Minority advocates Monday were pitching a multilingual version of the Federal Communications Commission's Emergency Alert System [1].

At an EAS Summit for broadcasters in Washington, D.C., the Minority Media & Telecommunications Council, the Independent Spanish Broadcasters Association and the Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ argued that "tens of millions of Americans are not fluent in English [2], and there are no stations broadcasting in their languages in many cities," according to prepared testimony supplied to B&C. "In many cities, multilingual stations are so few in number that damage to one outlet would deprive the market of broadcast communications in one or more widely spoken languages."

They argued that the multilingual Universal Emergency Broadcasting system would go well beyond EAS' "get to safety" warnings to provide a lot more information.

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