Regulation

Playboy senior White House correspondent and CNN contributor Brian Karem filed a lawsuit Tuesday against President Donald Trump and White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham over the suspension of his White House “hard pass” credential last week.

Heading towards a $20 billion showdown with Comcast at the U.S. Supreme Court this fall in his long running racial discrimination lawsuit against the media giant, Byron Allen today tore into the Brian Roberts-run company and an 11th hour intervention by the Department of Justice. “This is historic,” the Entertainment Studios boss said of an Aug. 15 brief filed by the feds seeking to tighten the definitions of a Reconstruction Era statute in Comcast’s favor. “Donald Trump’s DOJ and Comcast are working together to destroy a civil rights statute in the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Gray Television’s deal to buy KDLT Sioux Fall, S.D., and create a precedent-setting affiliate duopoly in the market has been hung up at the FCC for 15 months without any explanation. For the sake of buyers and sellers, large and small, the FCC needs to act.

Notice was published in the Federal Register today of the FCC’s changes in the children’s television rules — setting the effective date for most of those new rules as Sept. 16.

Media analysts and the entertainment industry aren’t the only ones paying attention to the recent CBS-Viacom merger. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, a current frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, has weighed in on the merger, Tweeting that the Department of Justice “should be paying close attention.”

The FCC today said Walt Disney Co.’s ABC unit has agreed to pay a $395,000 civil penalty after an October 2018 episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live used a simulated wireless alert tone.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on Wednesday circulated a draft order that would grant approval to the $26 billion tie-up of T-Mobile Us Inc. and Sprint Corp.

FTC Chairman Joe Simons, who is overseeing a tech task force, for the first time said he is prepared to break up major tech companies. He said this could be done by “unwinding” past mergers if the agency finds the companies are harming competition. Antitrust experts have argued for years that major tech companies buy startups to shut down their competition.

As if the last “spectrum reallocation” and subsequent repack hasn’t provided enough drama, there’s another move afoot to further trim broadcasters’ operational resources. This one hasn’t received the notice that the big “reverse auction” commanded, but it has the potential to send TV, radio, and cable system operators scrambling, should the FCC (and wireless providers) have their way.

A draft executive order from the White House could put the FCC in charge of shaping how Facebook, Twitter and other large tech companies curate what appears on their websites, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. The draft order, a summary of which was obtained by CNN, calls for the FCC to develop new regulations clarifying how and when the law protects social media websites when they decide to remove or suppress content on their platforms.

If the initial excitement you feel at the prospect of what will hopefully be another bountiful political advertising market quickly gives way to a sick, uneasy feeling as you try to recall the FCC’s rather complex, and often confusing, political broadcasting rules, then this “update” is for you.

The FCC this week issued a Notice of Apparent Liability proposing a $233,000 fine to Cumulus Media for violations of the sponsorship identification rules.  The fine illustrates not only how seriously the FCC takes its sponsorship identification rules (particularly in the context of political and issue advertising) but also the how aggressively the FCC can act for even the slightest violation of a consent decree involving a prior violation of its rules.

A judge ruled Wednesday that an investment adviser and former Fox Business commentator who sued NPR over stories about his role in funding a private investigator to probe the death of former Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich can go forward.

Charter execs put on something of a full court press at FCC last week to talk down broadcaster’s ATSC 3.0 transition. They met with staffers in the Media Bureau and Office of Engineering and Technology, as well as aides to four of the five commissioners, including the chairman. “We also discussed the consumer benefits of the ATSC 3.0 transition, noting that broadcasters have yet to define which among those possible uses of the new standard they are interested in pursuing,” Charter said in summarizing the meeting.

“There are no longitudinal studies that show a link between violence and video games,” said Benjamin Burroughs, a professor of emerging media at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “Certainly, there is no linkage to gun violence.” The theory persists in part because politicians on both sides of the aisle have taken it up as an easy target, since it lacks a powerful lobby like, say, the National Rifle Association.

How does Locast think it can get away with retransmitting broadcast signals to smartphones and smart TVs without compensating broadcasters? By claiming to be a nonprofit. But I expect that a federal judge will see through that fiction and find that it is nothing more than a front for Dish and AT&T’s DirecTV.

Billionaire Guo Wengui, a fugitive from China who resides in the United States, has filed a defamation lawsuit against WarnerMedia and CNN’s Erin Burnett, saying that a July 23 episode of Erin Burnett OutFront contained false statements about him.

In an Instagram post Sunday, Afton Williamson said that throughout the filming of the ABC show’s pilot, “I experienced racial discrimination/racially charged inappropriate comments from the hair department.”