“No finding of liability and no fine is appropriate in this case,” Gray says in its 48-page filing involving its Anchorage stations.
A federal judge on Monday said Netflix Inc. must face a defamation lawsuit by former Manhattan prosecutor Linda Fairstein over her portrayal as a racist and unethical villain in When They See Us, a 2019 series about the Central Park Five case.
In a letter to Senate leadership, all 50 state broadcaster associations are calling for passage of the Local Journalism Sustainability Act. They said the bill “would provide local newsrooms a lifeline that would enable them to sustain, and in some cases, significantly improve the critical public service these local media outlets provide their communities.”
The FCC Enforcement Bureau has issued a $20,000 fine against ESPN for “willfully violating the commission’s rules that prohibit the transmission of false or deceptive emergency alert system” tones during a program. The FCC said the violation occurred during the airing of 30 for 30: Roll Tide/War Eagle on Oct. 20, 2020.
The city of Jackson, Miss., will be required to pay more than $170,000 in legal fees to NBC affiliate WLBT’s parent company, Gray Television, after the Mississippi Ethics Commission ruled the city violated state law by taking more than a year to provide public records to WLBT. The fine represents the largest amount of money levied against a public body by the commission in Mississippi history, and will be one of a handful of times that the commission has required a public body to pay legal fees.
Mike Richards is in advanced negotiations to become permanent host of “Jeopardy!” But in what has become a familiar pattern for public figures, older incidents of questionable actions from his past quickly became a hot topic of conversation on social media.
Exclusives
The Local Journalism Sustainability Act proposes certain benefits for local newspaper subscribers, as well as benefits to advertisers who advertise on local media — both broadcast and print. For advertisers who place advertising in either a local newspaper or on a local broadcast stations, a tax credit of up to $5,000 would be available to certain small businesses who use local media to get their advertising messages to their communities.
A federal judge has officially dismissed a class-action complaint accusing YouTube and other companies of violating children’s privacy, paving the way for an appellate court to intervene in the matter. The legal battle began in 2019, when California resident Nicole Hubbard sued YouTube and various companies that had channels on the video platform — including Hasbro, the Cartoon Network, Mattel, and DreamWorks — for allegedly tracking her 5-year-old child in order to serve targeted ads.
President Joe Biden name checked The Walt Disney Co., Netflix, Google, Fox Corp. and other private companies for instituting new vaccine requirements for their employees. As he referred to the alarming rise in COVID-19 cases as the “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” the president also sought to single out major corporations that in recent weeks have instituted their own types of mandates.
Life felt a lot like TV judicial nonfiction as an appeals court poured ice cold water on efforts to drag the big salary of Judge Judy into the profits dust-up between CBS and Rebel Entertainment Partners over the now shuttered syndicated show. “It’s always gratifying when the correct judgment is affirmed,” Sheindlin said.
The messy legal battle over Netflix’s Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich docuseries has now gotten down and dirty. In a flurry of filings Monday, the streamer, director-showrunner Lisa Bryant, executive producer Joe Berlinger, and producers RadicalMedia and Leroy & Morton Productions all denied Alan Dershowitz’s claims of defamation and more made in May this year when he said he was hoodwinked into appearing in the high-profile series in 2019.
John Fawcett, who works on the Kudlow show hosted by Larry Kudlow on Fox Business Network, claims in his lawsuit filed in state Supreme Court in Manhattan that “sexual harassment, sex discrimination, and racial discrimination are still tolerated at Fox.”
The Walt Disney Co. clapped back at Black Widow star Scarlett Johansson, slamming the actress’ breach of contract lawsuit for showing “callous disregard for the horrific and prolonged global effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.” In a court filing on Thursday, Johansson said Disney’s decision to send the Marvel movie to Disney Plus at the same time it was released in theaters cost her millions of dollars in backend compensation.
The film star says the decision to release the film simultaneously on Disney Plus and in theaters cost her $50 million.
Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby alleges conference media rights partner ESPN conspired to damage the league by luring Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC as detailed in a cease and desist letter sent to the network on Wednesday.
The FCC has officially imposed the maximum per-violation fine of $512,228 each for all but one of the stations it had identified in a September 2020 notice of apparent liability as violating the FCC’s requirement of good faith retransmission consent negotiations. The 18 stations had been the target of a complaint by AT&T and its DirecTV DBS service alleging they had unreasonably delayed those negotiations including failing to respond to AT&T proposals.
A federal judge eviscerated arguments by more than 40 state attorneys general that Facebook had a monopoly.
Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan took aim at big technology companies in her first appearance before Congress as the agency’s head, saying online digital platforms are partly to blame for a surge in fraud reported by Americans during the pandemic. “Fraud has continued to surge,“ Khan said Wednesday before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. ”One reason is that fraud today is supercharged by digital platforms where this conduct is tolerated and even promoted.”
The FCC has taken a step toward potentially restoring the mandate that broadcasters file data on the diversity of their workforces and that the data be available to the public. Democrats in Congress, and at the FCC, have long called for a return to that data collection.
Few probably would have guessed that the industry would still be waiting around in late July for the Biden Administration to name a permanent FCC chair, but that’s where things stand. New Street Research public policy analyst Blair Levin recently said: “While interim Chair [Jessica] Rosenworcel continues to have significant Senate support, her inability to obtain the nomination after more than six months suggests to us that there is some internal White House opposition. But there is no clear front-runner for replacing her.”
Broadcasters this month pressed the FCC to change course and not force TV and radio stations to pay for a portion of the FCC broadband data collection, from which they said they derive no benefit. The National Association of Broadcasters, in meetings with the FCC’s Office of Managing Director, said that should only make regulated industries pay user fees on activities that have at least minimal relevance to that industry.
The president has stacked his administration with crusaders who have spent their careers challenging corporate consolidation.
The broadcast network affiliates want the FCC to “clarify” that its new enhanced sponsorship ID rules for foreign-owned government-supplied programming does not apply to long-form advertising (infomercials). The FCC in April voted to boost broadcasters’ disclosure requirements for programming on airtime leased by a foreign entity. The move comes amidst heightened focus on disinformation campaigns and despite some pushback from broadcasters, who argue the FCC is adding regs to an already overregulated service.
Last week, it was announced that the FCC would be considering some changes to its political broadcasting rules at its monthly open meeting in August. In some quarters, that raised concern that significant changes were coming in time for the 2022 congressional elections. But, when the draft of the proposed changes was released, it turned out that the changes were instead very minor.
TVNewsCheck‘s Michael Depp and Harry Jessell discuss the uncertainty lingering at the FCC, where Acting Chair Jessica Rosenworcel may be facing contention for the permanent job and a fifth commissioner has yet to be appointed.
The head-scratching inside the Beltway continues as the wait for a fifth Democratic Federal Communications Commission member — and for whoever is to be named the agency’s permanent chair — continues. Initial delays were thought to involve a decision between acting chair Jessica Rosenworcel and current commissioner Geoffrey Starks. But the name of broadband backer and one-time Public Knowledge head Gigi Sohn has surfaced as a new possible alternative — and one for whom the buzz had been growing
The House Tuesday passed a bill and a resolution aimed at achieving greater media diversity. The votes on each were 319-105 — they were part of a block vote on a handful of communications-related bills.
President Biden plans to appoint lawyer Jonathan Kanter as the head of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) antitrust division, the White House announced Tuesday, another sign of the administration’s intention to take on Big Tech. Kanter has been a favorite pick of progressive organizations pushing for the DOJ and Federal Trade Commission to do more to crack down on anticompetitive conduct, especially in the tech industry.
The Justice Department formally announced new rules designed to greatly limit prosecutors’ ability to obtain phone and email records of journalists. The rules, unveiled Monday by Attorney General Merrick Garland, came after the revelation that the DOJ subpoenaed information from reporters for CNN, Washington Post and The New York Times, part of an effort that started during Donald Trump’s administration and largely played out without the journalists’ knowledge. The journalists were not targets of an investigation but were believed to be part of an effort to probe the source of leaks to the news media.
