Reasonable Access Obligations in the Political Season

With regard to political advertising, Frank Jazzo of Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth reminds us that a station that is licensed as a noncommercial educational station (NCE) do not have reasonable access obligations. Any station that is not an NCE station must make their facilities available for uses by federal candidates, thus providing "reasonable access". Please note that state and local candidates do not have reasonable access rights.

Under these "reasonable access rights" a candidate may make an Equal Opportunities demand on a station for uses run on the station by an opposing candidate in the previous seven days. For example, if "candidate A" buys advertising on your station during a week, "candidate B" may make an Equal Opportunity demand on your station. In this case, if you have inventory to sell, there isn't a problem. However, if you've sold the week, the Equal Opportunity demand might lead you to either preempt some existing advertising or open your programming to accommodate candidate B's Equal Opportunities demands. Even if candidate A and candidate B were not opponents, but were both Federal candidates for different offices, time would have to be made available to both to provide "reasonable access".

As a reminder, once political time is sold to candidates for spots with uses in them, the candidates would be entitled to the lowest unit charge (LUC) for those spots running during the 45 day window before the primary and the 60 day window before the general election. The LUC applies to local, state and federal candidates.

Lowest Unit Charge

A political ad is entitled to the LUC only if it is considered a candidate spot and is only available to candidates for office whose voice is on the radio commercial. The candidate's election committee must be the entity paying for the buy, which must be disclosed on a disclaimer within the commercial. If it is not a spot specifically for a candidate, then regular rates apply, as in all issue-only ads.