Another radio station bites the dust– right in my backyard… Hornell, NY based WHHO 1320, a Fox Sports Radio affiliate owned by a local radio owner, had its license renewal blocked by the FCC last week. According to the FCC, the owner did not broadcast legally-required statements and didn’t keep a public information file. The FCC gave WHHO a choice: pay $10,000 or lose your license. So, the owner, who also owned a much more successful FM (WKPQ), tried to sell off the FM to another company, but wasn’t able to do so. Once his license expired, the FCC said they wouldn’t renew it.
WHHO, by the way, gave free air time to future Congressman Eric Massa every week, while not offering the same to his opponents… but that little violation of equal time didn’t even get mentioned, despite the fact that Massa only narrowly won election in 2008.
The FCC facility ID is 5308, which gives a sense of how old the station was… for FCC database geeks, the records are stored under DWHHO, indicating the deleted callsign….. it was 5kw daytime, 22 watts at night…
According to the Consent decree the owner agreed to, the public file issue covered a period of 8 years… He agreed to pay a $1k “voluntary contribution” per month for 10 months and didn’t make a single payment. Not knowing the specifics, you don’t stipulate things to the FCC and then turn around and back out and not do what you promised.
I’m picking up lots of little signs that the FCC is getting some backbone…. they’re mostly turning down STA “stay silent” requests for “financial reasons”, and tightening up rules on the games being played to “move” a station to a new city only by shuffling paperwork to circumvent the ownership limits. I’m keeping an eyeball out for when the FCC pushes the issue of all those Clear Channel stations still sititng in the “Alaho trust”…. Clear Channel was obligated to divest them as soon as pratical, and we’re over 2 years now… CC has been playing lots of these kinds of games of redesignating the community of license without moving the station, on stations it had agreed to sell and then back out of selling them.
As I’ve hinted elsewhere, I think you’re going to see a lot of AM station licenses be surrendered in the next couple years. I don’t know if anyone even follows that – people watch the FCC announcements for new stations and enforcement actions, but I’m not sure how people would notice when the owner surrenders the license. I’ve had conversations about the related topic of who would even know if a station turned off its transmitter and just didn’t bother to tell the FCC? If it was a foreign language or small religious station, I’m guessing it would be a while… the DXer types might notice it gone, but would they send a letter to the FCC?