Regulation

The NFL has lost a Canadian appeals court battle to stop the CTV network from being forced to air United States Super Bowl telecast commercials.

Kirkland, Wash.-based Wave Broadband has filed a claim with the FCC saying cable giant Comcast is unfairly trying to force Wave to provide higher-priced sports TV channels to customers who don’t want them.

The Open Internet Preservation Act, introduced Tuesday by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or throttling legal content, applications or services.

Three former employees claim a Sinclair affiliate discriminates against women and ignored complaints about harassment. Jaclyn Mason, Richelle Meiss and Rebecca Zak are suing Sinclair, along with its digital comedy venture Circa Laughs, Medio Pictures Partners, Airplane! writer-director David Zucker and Medio COO Randall Sherman.

The sale of WPME Lewiston, Maine, by Ironwood Communications Portland to Ion Media Networks tops the latest list of TV station transactions submitted to the FCC for its approval, according to BIA/Kelsey.

A U.S. federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that music licensing giant BMI did not have to abide by the Obama administration’s more restrictive interpretation of how royalties should be collected. The decision dealt a setback to the Justice Department’s effort to require BMI and ASCAP, to license music to digital streaming services, radio and television stations, bars and other music users only if they could issue a “full-work” license.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Former “Glee” star Mark Salling has pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography. Salling entered the plea in a downtown Los Angeles federal court on Monday […]

Can anyone with even the most nominal understanding of these businesses argue that having one company own the ESPN channel group along with the Fox regional sports channels would be good for consumers and competition?

AT&T and the U.S. Department of Justice have been unable to resolve antitrust concerns over the pending Time Warner acquisition outside of court, according to a document filed Friday.

An Iowa Supreme Court justice has issued a highly unusual order prohibiting the Des Moines Register from publishing information gleaned from court records. The Register has objected, calling the order an unlawful form of prior restraint that violates the First Amendment and “stands as an undesirable and unsustainable outlier in the law and policy of this state and this nation.”

Lawmakers on the House and Senate’s top antitrust committee say Congress should take a closer look at Disney’s $52 billion bid to buy 21st Century Fox.

The FCC plans to fine Sinclair Broadcast Group $13.3 million after it failed to properly disclose that paid programming that aired on its TV stations was sponsored by a cancer institute, three people briefed on the matter told Reuters. The proposed fine covers about 1,700 spots including commercials that looked like news stories that aired during newscasts for the Utah-based Huntsman Cancer Institute over a six-month period in 2016.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Justice Department has signaled it is willing to approve Sinclair Broadcast Group’s planned takeover of Tribune Media. but with a condition: It wants the companies to sell off roughly a dozen television stations. DOJ told the companies the deal as currently structured raises antitrust problems and that 12 to 13 station sales are necessary to alleviate concerns about competition in markets where a combined Sinclair-Tribune would otherwise have a commanding presence. Journal subscribers can read the full story here.

In another boost to major station owners like Sinclair and Fox, yet another partisan vote by the Republican-controlled FCC moved the commission a step closer to raising or eliminating the 39% ownership cap. The rule adopted today starts a process of review that many local broadcasters and observers see as likely to result in a change to the longstanding cap, which currently limits a single owner from controlling stations with reach to more than 39% of U.S. households.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) is calling on the Justice Department to investigate whether the 2011 Comcast-NBC merger has hurt market competition. Blumenthal sent a letter to the Trump administration’s top antitrust prosecutor, Makan Delrahim, on Wednesday, asking him to revisit the deal and to try to keep in place behavioral conditions that are set to expire next year.

The Thursday FCC vote along party lines will likely usher in big changes in how Americans use the internet, a radical departure from more than a decade of federal oversight. The move not only rolls back restrictions that keep broadband providers like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T from blocking or collecting tolls from services they don’t like, but bars states from imposing their own rules.

Blue Alerts are designed to protect law enforcement officers and communities.

The Thursday vote scheduled at the FCC could usher in big changes in how Americans use the internet, a radical departure from more than a decade of federal oversight. A growing public movement suggests that the FCC vote won’t be the end of the issue. Opponents of the move plan legal challenges, and some net-neutrality supporters hope to ride that wave of public opinion into the 2018 elections.

NEW YORK (AP) — A civil rights activist is suing Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, claiming she defamed him while discussing a lawsuit against the Black Lives Matter movement that […]

The FCC’s Media Bureau has levied a $20,000 fine for a licensee operating a five-station cluster in South Carolina that allegedly did not keep good EEO records and, when subject to a random EEO audit, was unable to identify any recruitment sources for other than word-of-mouth recruiting for six of 11 hires over a two-year period.

Democrats are trying to pressure the at the 11th hour to call off its planned Thursday vote to scrap its net neutrality regulations. Today, 39 senators sent a letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai urging him to call off his “reckless” proposal to eliminate the Obama-era regulations.

Sen. Claire McCaskill has written FCC Chairman Ajit Pai voicing concerns about the “negative impact” on the St. Louis media market from the proposed merger of Sinclair Broadcast Group and Tribune Media. “If the Sinclair-Tribune transaction is approved as proposed it would leave three stations in the hands of one company, including two of the top four stations in the market,” she wrote.

Here’s a situation at the FCC worth watching as we could see similar requests down the line. Entravision has asked the agency to modify the TV market of WJAL after receiving $25.5 mlllion in the incentive auction to vacate the station’s original channel allocation in Hagerstown, Md.

While most of the principles governing the FCC rules on political broadcasting are relatively established, new advertising practices and opportunities always raise questions as to how those established rules are to be applied. Programmatic buying of ad time is one of those areas where these questions have arisen in recent years. In the last few years, programmatic buying has become the buzzword in broadcast ad circles. Here are some answers.

The Federal Trade Commission and the FCC announced an agreement on Monday to coordinate their efforts to police the internet once the latter agency has repealed its net neutrality rules set for a vote on Thursday..

The duopoly, the FCC and the hunger for scale — these three forces are roiling the news industry, from corporate conglomerates to your hometown daily.

In a tweet Sunday, President Trump blasted the lack of attention over what he described as “false and defamatory stories” by the “Fake News Media.” “They are out of control — correct reporting means nothing to them. Major lies written, then forced to be withdrawn after they are exposed…a stain on America!” Trump wrote.

Since the FCC announced just before Thanksgiving that it was planning to gut the rules, there have been about 750,000 calls to Congress made through Battle for the Net, a website run by groups that advocate for net neutrality. By contrast, there were fewer than 30,000 calls in the first two weeks of November.