You Said What? the Perils of Content-Based Regulation of Public Broadcast Underwriting Acknowledgments‪.‬

Public broadcast stations in the United States are forbidden to air promotional announcements in exchange for payment from commercial entities. (1) However, under the FCC's sponsorship rules, these stations must acknowledge any financial contribution from donors that support particular programs. (2) Consequentially, public broadcast stations must broadcast information--so-called "underwriting" acknowledgements--regarding those individuals and companies that fund particular programs without promoting the goods and services offered by those donors. In particular, the FCC has interpreted this to prohibit the following: (a) qualitative or comparative descriptions; (b) price information; (c) calls to action; or (d) inducements to buy, sell, rent, or lease. (3) From a legal point of view, these sets of prohibitions distinguish underwriting announcements aired on public broadcast stations from commercial messages aired on their commercial counterparts. As modern advertising practices quickly move away from the traditional model of comparing the quality of an advertiser's product with its competing products toward "image spots" (where claims about the product are frequently absent), the FCC rules tend to look more and more like an anachronism. To illustrate, many commercial spots can be seamlessly transferred (sometimes with little or no editing) to serve as underwriting spots in a way that seems to blur in the public mind the distinction between commercials and nonpromotional underwriting acknowledgement. While the FCC has attempted to maintain the conceptual distinction between promotional and nonpromotional depictions, it has struggled to apply its traditional notion of what it means to be promotional within the context of this evolution in advertising practice.