Here are some of the regulatory developments of significance to broadcasters from the past week, with links to where you can go to find more information as to how these actions may affect your operations.
- The FCC’s Media Bureau released a Public Notice purporting to provide guidance directed to broadcast TV stations on whether the appearance of candidates in talk programs, particularly in late night and daytime TV, require that equal time be given to opposing candidates. The notice’s subheading summarized its main message – that programming motivated by partisan purposes will not be considered exempt from equal opportunities obligations. The notice also said that prior FCC decisions declaring certain programs to be exempt should not be relied on by other broadcasters for assurance that similar programs are also exempt, stating that only by asking the FCC for a determination of whether their program is exempt does a broadcaster have any assurance that equal time will not apply when candidates appear in those programs. We wrote in an article on our Broadcast Law Blog more about how this decision reverses prior Commission staff guidance that broadcasters would be given reasonable discretion to make their own decisions as to whether their programs are exempt, some of the confusion that the notice will likely cause, and its practical impact. FCC Commissioner Gomez released a statement calling the Bureau’s Public Notice “misleading” noting that “nothing has fundamentally changed with respect to our political broadcasting rules” but the announcement, putting the Commission in the role of deciding whether a broadcaster’s decision to include a candidate appearance in a program was motivated by partisan purposes or by the station’s reasonable judgment as to the appearance’s newsworthiness “does represent an escalation in this FCC’s ongoing campaign to censor and control speech.”
- The FCC announced that February 23 is the effective date of many of the changes adopted in a December Report and Order in the rules for Class A TV, LPTV, and TV Translator stations. However, many of the substantive rule changes adopted in the Order will first require approval of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) before becoming effective. The effective date will be announced in later notices for changes including those setting a maximum relocation distance of 49.1 kilometers from a station’s current antenna reference coordinates for all minor modification applications; establishing a formal method for these stations to change their communities of license (requiring that a station’s protected contour overlap a boundary of its community of license and that all stations must file for a community of license compliant with this requirement within 6 months of the new rule’s effective date); requiring Class A and LPTV stations to use call signs matching their service designation (“-LD” for LPTV and “-CD” for Class A) but grandfathering existing call signs establishing; and adopting a formal process to change a station’s classification from LPTV to TV translator (or vice versa).
- The Media Bureau issued a Hearing Designation Order against the licensee of three Texas radio stations to determine whether its licenses should be revoked and whether a transfer of control application proposing to change the licensee’s owner should be granted. The Bureau determined that there was evidence that the proposed owner, a Mexican citizen, had controlled the stations for several years by providing programming and sales services without any written agreement and financing for the stations. The Order indicated that questions were raised by the applicants not revealing these arrangements in the pending application and by being unresponsive or inconsistent in responding to Commission inquiries about the relationships between the parties. Because of the possibility of misrepresentations and unauthorized transfers of control, the Bureau concluded that there were substantial questions requiring a hearing to assess both the current and proposed owners’ character qualifications to hold the stations’ licenses.
- The FCC submitted its annual report to Congress regarding it Fiscal Year 2025 enforcement of the PIRATE Act, which enables the FCC to issue substantial fines up to $2,391,097 against pirate radio operators and the owners of property from which pirates operate (see our article on the adoption of the PIRATE Act). The report notes that the Commission issued six forfeiture orders (monetary fines) and ten notices of apparent liability for pirate radio broadcasting, and it entered into three consent decree agreements with pirate radio operators—each with twenty-year compliance plans to avoid future violations. It also issued warnings to 28 owners of property from which pirates had been operating. Many of these actions were taken following FCC “sweeps” of major metropolitan areas, as authorized by the Pirate Act.
- The FCC’s Media and Enforcement Bureaus announced two Consent Decrees to resolve investigations into compliance with Online Public Inspection File (OPIF) obligations that arose during the review of station license renewal applications:
- The Media Bureau and the Enforcement Bureau entered into a Consent Decree with a Guam noncommercial TV station after finding that the station failed to upload its 2014-2021 Annual EEO Public File Reports to its OPIF (although it had uploaded them to its own website), and failed to timely upload 27 Quarterly Issues/Programs Lists to its OPIF during the renewal period. The Consent Decree grants the station’s renewal application for only 2 years (as opposed to the normal 8-year term) and requires the station to adopt a formal compliance plan to ensure that future OPIF violations do not occur.
- The Media Bureau entered into a Consent Decree with two Pennsylvania Class A TV stations after finding that the stations inaccurately certified their compliance with their OPIF obligations in their renewal applications when the stations each failed to timely upload 6 Quarterly Issues/Programs Lists during the renewal period. The Consent Decree grants the stations’ renewal applications for the full 8-year term but requires that the stations pay a $6,000 voluntary contribution to the U.S. Treasury and adopt a formal compliance plan.
- The Media Bureau denied a petition for reconsideration of the dismissal of a construction permit application for a new Iowa LPFM station. As we noted here, the Bureau previously dismissed the application for several reasons including the application’s technical issues that were not allowed to be corrected by amendment. The Bureau rejected the applicant’s arguments in its petition including that the Bureau lacked statutory authority to prohibit major amendments to new LPFM applications, finding that the rule fell squarely within the FCC’s fundamental authority to make rules governing the assignment of radio frequencies.
On our Broadcast Law Blog, we published our annual article explaining the legal issues that can arise from advertising and promotions designed around the Super Bowl.
