Last week, NAB responded to the FCC’s request for comments on potential changes to its Part 11 governing the Emergency Alert System (EAS) to accommodate the new common alerting protocol (CAP) for EAS messages that the Federal Emergency Management Agency intends to introduce latter this year. In our comments, NAB stated that the federal government should fund and institute EAS training for state and local emergency managers so that the benefits of the next generation of EAS will be fully realized. We also argued that the FCC’s current rule requiring broadcasters to configure their networks to accept CAP-based EAS alerts within 180 days of FEMA’s announcement of the new CAP standards should be more flexible or extended to 12 months. Finally, we urged the FCC to finally resolve the cable override problem by requiring cable systems to implement “selective override” of broadcast stations. Reply Comments are due June 14, 2010.

Click here to read NAB's comments.