How do certain non-commercial stations get away with advertising products and airing commercials. I thought they could only say this program is brought to you by "abc business" with address & Phone Number and not a full description of their products and services.

The line between "underwriting" and advertising is very fine. Several of the stations that I have been with over the years adhered to the same guidelines that you mentioned: You can say who sponsored the program and give some contact information. Additionally, you can make a brief factual statement about the nature of the business.

You are not allowed to say anything meant to encourage listeners to buy products or patronize businesses. Direct calls-to-action, of course are forbidden, even if they are stated as opinion; i.e. "This is Joe Blow, and I'm tellin' ya, you've got to come check out my saxophone band, playing tonight at Al's House of Brew." Comparative statements or mentions of prices also fall into this category. For example:
"Jim's Pizza Parlor--Making the city's best pie since 1973."
"You get the best deals at Bob's"
"We have reasonable rates"
"Used CDs starting at $5.99"

I find that a lot of non-commercial broadcasters, particularly NPR/PBS skate on thin ice is when they air corporate slogans as part of the underwriting. Slogans almost always have verbiage that could be considered to be comparative or to be a call to action.

Right...no call to action...just the facts mame...

or "maam"

"I find that a lot of non-commercial broadcasters, particularly NPR/PBS skate on thin ice is when they air corporate slogans as part of the underwriting. Slogans almost always have verbiage that could be considered to be comparative or to be a call to action."

Actually, corporate slogans ARE allowed EVEN when they include comparative statements:

"GE They bring good things to life" or even "DuPont Better things for better living" just not "Joe's Bar Dollar Shots during Happy Hour!"

How do you feel about "Joe's Bar Dollar Shots": The quality goes in before the name goes on.

There is no "getting away with" anything going on.

Non-profits cannot return any profits back to the people in the organization for personal use.

Privately owned businesses can.

Simple.

Since the government is out of helping non-com radio, I'd say leave them alone.

Besides, as our president has shown, if you can "bend the rules" without crossing the fine line, anything goes. But cross that fine line, you're Ted Stevens.

Again, we've no broken ice. No concern.

I think that the point that "The_Special_Master" was trying to make was that PBS, NPR, GE, and DuPont are fairly large organizations that have enough clout to be able to "bend" the rules slightly. If the station in question were a low-budget community station or a university student station and the business were an independent mom & pop place, the rules might be more strictly enforced. The_special_master, please correct me if I misinterpreted your post.

In order for a non-commercial station to get fined for running commercial material, somebody has to file a complaint with the FCC. "Regular" people (i.e. those who are not insiders) do not understand the difference between underwriting and advertising, and it is highly unlikely that they would go to the trouble of recording an aircheck of alleged rules violation and writing a complaint letter. The people who file these kinds of complaints are usually disgruntled former volunteers or members of other non-commercial stations.

I have some personal experience from my days at WITR regarding the filing of complaints against other non-commercial stations in the market. The story goes like this: WBER was (and still is) owned by the Monroe County Board of Cooperative Education Services. The manager of that radio station at the time put in a number of reforms that changed the radio station from a somewhat chaotic-sounding block formatted operation to one with a full-time playlisted modern rock format. Furthermore, the manager had the "bright" idea that for WBER to sound competitive, it should intentionally overdeviate its signal. Said manager also happened to own a record store. A number of former WBER volunteers went over to WITR. Pretty soon, there was a lot of anti-WBER water cooler talk going on at WITR. WBER was bad because they weren't doing what non-commercial stations are "supposed" to do. WBER was bad because its manager was supposedly using the station to promote his record store. WBER was bad because they were deliberately trying to be like a commercial radio station, with their loud on-air sound and their playlisted format. One of our engineers wrote a letter to the FCC complaining of WBER's overmodulation and (if memory serves me correctly) about the conflict of interest in the station manager running spots for his record store on WBER. I later heard that the FCC fined WBER for the overmodulation, although I never did hear whether they acted on the underwriting complaint.