This is really old news, but I hadn’t noticed it before now and found it interesting. Art Bell has long been the owner of radio station KNYE-FM in his home town of Pahrump, Nevada.
If you’ve followed Art Bell’s recent history, he was suddenly left a widower when his wife died in 2006 from complications from asthma. Shortly thereafter, Art decided to marry a very young woman from the Phillipines and start a new family – living in the Phillipines.
Art attempted to do his show remotely from the Phillipines with very limited success and gave up trying. He now does the Noory show as an occasional fillin host – apparently they’ve figured out a reliable way to do the broadcast remotely from half way around the world.
U.S. Law requires FCC licensed stations to be owned by U.S. Citizens (or corporation entities not controlled by foreigners). Art Bell becoming an ex-pat and living permanently outside the United States creates a curious question – can a U.S. citizen that is not residing in the United States continue to own a U.S. radio station and for how long? I’m making an assumption that Art Bell hasn’t renounced his U.S. Citizenship and become a citizen of the Phillipines.
Well, the question doesn’t matter now. Art’s radio station in Pahrump was “sold” for $600k in 2008 to one Karen Jackson. Karen had been running the station during the period while Art was starting his new life.
The FCC filings only mention the price – it is not uncommon on a radio station sale for some or all of the purchase price to be in the form of a note rather than cash. The sale was done as a transfer of control of the corporation that owns the license rather than an assignment of the license to a new legal entity.
OMG – look – a chupacabra out the window!
I tried a few times over the years to listen to Bell and later on to Noory, but it kept getting in the way of my profeyshunal rasslin’ time. One may have only so much culture it seems.
Wow. 600K in this business climate for a rural AM in the middle of the desert that only in the loosest of circumstances could even be considered a rimshot? I’ve seen stations like that go for a tenth of that price lately. Ms. Jackson paid a nice premium for that station.
It’s an FM station, not that it takes away from your point.
I don’t have any fact to prove it, but my guess is Art took back most or all of the sales price as a promissory note. The Corporation that holds the license was sold to Ms. Jackson.
One of the weaknesses to the FCC’s ownership rules is that for the past couple decades, businesses are now more funded by private lending than by selling stock or publicly traded bonds. Lending money to a business tends to make you a defacto owner, especially if the lending agreement contains clauses prohibiting the owner from buying or selling assets without the consent of the lender. The FCC tends to draw the line of when lending becomes owning based on whether the lender is involved in day to day decisions like programming, employment decisions and the like. As long as the private equity firms create a pretense that they are not involved in the decisions making (see: Clear Channel and the Mays family), then the FCC doesn’t necessarily look too closely at the origin of the funds invested in (loaned to) the company. It’s only when the lenders take legal control of the company that the FCC looks closely at ownership limits, foreign ownership, etc… It’s a huge hole.