I’m going through the list of FCC applications today for a few weeks of data, and it’s damn depressing. They are either applications to stay silent or sales where the seller is taking back a note for a large portion of the relatively small purchase price because the buyer doesn’t have the cash to buy the station or the ability to borrow the money from anywhere – which means it is extremely unlikely the new owner is going to turn the station around.<\/p>\n
So what’s the best “public policy” option here? In the good old pre-deregulation, the FCC used to be really hardass about this from what I can tell – you had 30 days to tell the FCC why your station was off the air for more than 10 days. You needed a good reason or your license was gone. If you had a good reason beyond your control like a tornado, flood, seizure by a trustee, local government shutting you down, etc… you had 6 months to repair the station and get it back on the air. At 6 months, you had to prove that you made a good faith effort to get the station back on the air and explain why 6 months wasn’t enough time. If you were just sitting on your ass, you lost the license. At the end of a year, you lost the license no matter what, unless you had extremely unusual circumstances.<\/p>\n
Now people have licenses with no tower, no studio and no money – just playing the game enough to keep the FCC from canceling the license… or they just tell the FCC they’re broke and they can’t figure out a way to make the station pay its bills, but the owner apparently is not motivated to try to sell the station. It may well be the tower is making lots of money as a cell phone and 3G\/4G wireless transmitter, and they just don’t want the expense of running the AM station that has no listeners.<\/p>\n
Tom Taylor reported today that one of the remaining Democratic members of the FCC is leaving soon, leaving it with only 3 members out of 5. Since only the Senate has a say in approving the nominations, the Democrats will control the nominees unless Republicans want to make this an issue to die for (this idea of invoking filibusters for appointments is really wrong – these are presidential powers to pick his people…. the time to have that fight was during the 2008 election….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m going through the list of FCC applications today for a few weeks of data, and it’s damn depressing. They are either applications to stay silent or sales where the seller is taking back a note for a large portion … Continue reading