The Office of Communication of United Church Of Christ filed suit yesterday in an effort to prevent the Federal Communications Commission from the deregulating the radio industry without disclosing the public the basis for its decision.
The suit, filed in District Court in Manhattan, accuses the agency of unlawfully withholding studies and documents it is to in deciding it should loosen Government restrictions on the nation's 8600 radio stations.
On September 6, the communications commission proposed to drop its current maximum time limits each hour for commercials and its minimum is for public affairs programming, to drop the formal survey structure (called ascertainment) by which stations must determine community needs and to drop the requirement to keep program logs. (The commission gave the public until January 25 to comment on the proposals.)
The suit charged that the agency was deliberately and unlawfully withholding information that public-interest groups must have to prepare their comments.
The United Church of Christ, which has 1.8 million members, is one of several groups that contend elimination of requirements might allow radio stations to abrogate their public-service obligations.
"The purpose of the suit is to keep the FCC from changing the rules until the courts can look at how they are going to better to," said the Rev. Everette C. Parker, director of the church's Office of Communications.
"The FCC claims that by freeing stations to sell as much time as they can do program only for those who will buy, the public will somehow be better served by radio then it is now," Mr. Parker said. "They have not presented one shred of proof, except a spurious survey a handful of stations."
The agency's proposal to deregulate radio followed a staff analysis, based on a sampling of stations in Florida and Alabama, which indicated that stations were exceeding the minimum guidelines for news and public-affairs programming and staying below maximum guidelines for commercials.
Request for Records
In its suit to the church office said it asked the agency this year for certain records used by the commission in considering whether it should relax the regulations.
In particular, the church did it asked for the results of an experimental study under which the FCC exempted small community radio stations from the ascertainment requirement, and the fourth sampling techniques used by the commission's staff in its survey of Florida and Alabama stations.
A spokesman for the FCC said that although he had not seen the court papers, some of the church's requests may be met as a result of commission action last week. The spokesman said the ascertainment experiment ended December 1, and the commission promised to release the results as soon as the information had been compiled. He said the commission agreed to describe within the next few days how it conducted its sampling.
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