So imagine you’re the owner of WABV-AM in Abbeville SC – a small town in rural SC near the Georgia border. Your 1000 watt AM station only can be heard in your small town of about 5000 people – even in the heyday of AM radio, that’s too small to have a viable station. Since at least 2007, your transmitter has been broken and operating only at partial power, so you aren’t even making it out into the farm pastures around the city.
What’s an owner to do? Well, you could try to sell the station by putting it on your web site:
http://www.wabv1590.info/
but that’s not very creative.
How about – let’s move the station to Nevada!
Back in 2004, an AM station license in Las Vegas became available via an auction. Eight applications were made to build a station there – WABV proposed to change their “Community of License” to a suburb of Las Vegas (most of the TV and Radio stations are located on a mountain that overlooks the city). They propose building an array of 9 AM towers and move their existing station about 1,800 miles.
As of September 2009, the FCC couldn’t pick a winner, so decided to hold an auction among the 8. It is now July 2011 and the FCC has not yet scheduled AM Auction #84.
It’s important to know that in the FCC bidding process, $1 is not $1. If you are a “special” type of person, you get a discount on your bid. I may bid $900,000 for a license and lose to someone else who bids $950,000 – but they only actually pay $300,000 because they are a gay disabled black native american hispanic female Friend of Harry Reid who has no experience running a radio station – and the Small Business Administration will “loan” them the money for the down payment to borrow the rest from Goldman Sachs.
This process is explained in this word document created by the FCC Advisory Committee on Diversity For Communications In The Digital Age
They can’t come right out and say “Give licenses to people based on their race”, so they obfuscate it with lawyer language like “People who have overcome obstacles like lack of access to credit”.