FCC

The FCC has levied a fine of $504,000 against Fox for “willfully violating” commission rules on transmitting EAS tones during regular programming. The violation occurred during an NFL promo aired Nov. 28, 2021. Fox described the promotional segment as a “short comedic advertisement” for an upcoming game, which was aired as part of the Fox NFL Sunday pre-game show.

It is beginning to look like the 2-2 deadlock that has marked the FCC for the past two years is not about to come to an end in the near-term, even though Democrats now have an extra vote in the Senate to confirm Gigi Sohn. As the Senate returns from a two-week recess, there is a growing expectation that Sohn’s nomination will need to go through a full confirmation process once again — including a third hearing in front of the Senate Commerce Committee.

Cable operators say various commitments made by Standard General to address their concerns about its deal to acquire station group Tegna need to be modified and expanded before the FCC considers signing off on the $8 billion-plus merger. NCTA–The Internet & Television Association has signaled to the FCC in comments on those commitments that while Standard General was close to addressing NCTA’s concerns, it was not ready to hand out cigars.

Fear not broadcasters: Even if streaming ultimately pushes linear TV over the precipice, your spectrum still has value for datacasting or auction.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Wednesday sent a letter to the FCC urging it to block Standard General’s proposed $8.6 billion acquisition of Tegna. In her letter, Warren said “the parties themselves have acknowledged that this deal is likely to produce anticompetitive effects,” including higher prices, worker layoffs and collusion.

The opponents of Gigi Sohn’s nomination to the FCC are bringing out their familiar artillery in their effort to keep her off the agency, where she would be the third Democrat, giving the Biden administration the majority it would need to tackle partisan issues, notably network neutrality rules. Following President Joe Biden’s renomination of Sohn last week, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), launched an attack on her character and her politics, while Fox News Channel also ran a story taking aim.

The FCC announced late Friday afternoon that all items required to be placed in the Online Public Inspection File between Jan. 1 and Jan. 31 may now be uploaded to the OPIF by Jan. 31 and be considered timely. The FCC released a Public Notice on Jan. 6 announcing that the OPIF filing system has been experiencing technical difficulties since at least Jan. 1, necessitating the extension.

A coalition of Hispanic groups is renewing calls for President Biden to “name a person of Latino descent” to the FCC. The campaign comes as the White House forges ahead with the long-stalled nomination of Gigi Sohn. Over a dozen civil rights and advocacy groups wrote in a letter to Biden that tapping a Hispanic nominee for the agency would represent “a powerful sign of your commitment to our community.”

Sometimes in Washington the best indicator that something big is brewing is when suddenly everyone clams up. Such is the case with the long simmering effort to impose retransmission consent regulations on streaming video carriage of local stations. Recent sub rosa negotiations are not very well hidden, since affiliate groups and lobbyists (including the NAB) have submitted ex parte filings about their FCC meetings on the topic. Both FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel and NAB President Curtis LeGeyt have acknowledged that decisions are overdue on streaming retransmission policies for video via virtual multichannel video programming distributors.

President Joe Biden, who at first did not succeed in getting his FCC nominee confirmed, or even voted on the the full Senate, is try, trying again, signaling he is not giving up on Gigi Sohn. Sohn has become a contentious pick, leaving the FCC at a 2-2 political tie for longer than at any other time. The president on Jan. 3 again submitted the nomination of Sohn to be the fifth commissioner, and third Democrat, on the FCC. She has been nominated to a five-year term, but since it is retroactive to the departure of the commissioner she is replacing — Chairman Ajit Pai, whose term expired in July 2021 — it will be, at most, a three-year-plus term.

Dish has sent the FCC a term sheet it says backs up the claim, cited in a story in Broadcasting + Cable, that Cox Media Group wanted to include both Standard General and Tegna stations in retrans talks. Standard General is trying to get the FCC to sign off on its $8 billion-plus deal to acquire the Tegna stations. It has told the FCC it will not bundle Cox and Tegna stations in retrans talks and Cox has disputed the Dish claim, saying it never has and never will try to do so.

The long-anticipated Standard General-Tegna merger won’t be happening before the new year, as the FCC has requested another round of comments concerning the deal. The request came shortly after Standard General announced a series of formal commitments to ease regulators’ concerns about how the $8.6 billion merger would affect journalism jobs and retransmission consent agreements.

Comcast and Standard General have struck an agreement confirming Standard General’s pledge to the FCC that it would agree not to raise the retransmission consent rates of Tegna stations charged to MVPDs to that of its Cox Media Group TV stations — if applicable — after the closing of its deal to buy those Tegna stations. That is according to Standard General, which said the agreement on not raising the rates was reached this week with Comcast, which is the largest cable group carrying Tegna stations.

Cellphone carriers facing roughly $200 million in fines for sharing their customers’ locations are for now shielded from paying by the FCC’s partisan deadlock, according to people familiar with the matter. A partisan divide leaves the regulator short of the votes required to require T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon to pay fines.

The GOP commissioner says the foreign-investment panel needs to wrap up its review, and without cutting a deal.

The seemingly never-ending FCC review of the Standard General-Tegna merger will continue into the New Year. The FCC has sought comment on Standard General’s latest attempts to get the commission to sign off on the deal and has given commenters until Jan. 20, after which it must vet those comments, meaning the FCC likely won’t be making any decision until at least early February (to demonstrate that it vetted those latest comments before making its decision).

Standard General is trying hard to get its Tegna deal done by year-end. The FCC is currently on day 246 of its unofficial 180-day shot clock for vetting mergers. In a letter to the FCC Friday, the company committed to no journalism or newsroom layoffs for at least two years after the merger is approved and closes.

The FCC has agreed to a notice of proposed rulemaking targeting “digital discrimination,” by which the regulator means trying to “facilitate equal access to broadband internet service” and prevent harm to “historically excluded and marginalized communities.” The notice is intended to collect comment on the FCC’s proposal to use the definition of digital discrimination used in the President Joe Biden-backed Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which directed the agency to combat that discrimination.

The key Democrat’s confirmation remains stuck in committee.

Things keep getting messier between Comcast and Nexstar, with the cable operator filing a complaint at the FCC late Monday alleging that Nexstar and Mission have failed to negotiate retransmission consent in good faith. It comes as the cable operator faces the possibility of losing more than 90 Nexstar stations this weekend.

Rainbow PUSH Coalition founder Rev. Jesse Jackson has told the FCC it should approve the merger of Standard General and Tegna. In a letter to the FCC Monday (Dec. 12), Jackson said that after meeting with Standard General founding partner Soo Kim, who is Asian-American, and upon “careful and scrupulous review of his record on diversity and inclusion,” he and his organization “wholeheartedly support the purchase of Tegna.”

Prospects for Gigi Sohn — a controversial nominee to join the FCC who is a major proponent of restoring so-called “net neutrality” rules that used to govern the internet — may hinge on the outcome of the Georgia Senate runoff. A Rafael Warnock win would give Democrats a 51-to-49 Senate majority. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin is the only Democrat who still doesn’t support nominee Gigi Sohn and the extra vote would mean the Republicans cannot stop the nomination as she would get through in a tie, sources said.

Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell, who heads the panel that overseas the FCC, said the nomination of Democrat Gigi Sohn to fill the key fifth seat on the commission faced an issue of timing when asked if the Senate would take up the nomination before the end of December. The FCC has been divided 2-2 between Democrats and Republicans since January 2021. “It’s all about the queue of are we doing legislation or are we doing nom(inations) and my sense is right now we’re trying to get the omnibus done,” Cantwell said.

Standard General continues to collect anecdotal backing for its proposed merger with Tegna, which the FCC is still vetting on day 221 of its unofficial 180-day shot clock for reviewing such deals. One of the recent submissions to the FCC docket is from Marcia Green, who identifies herself as the former director of programming for a medium-size ABC affiliate. Green is a fan of Deb McDermott, currently Standard General’s CEO.

The FCC has voted unanimously on rules banning the importation and sale of communications equipment that could pose a threat to national security. The FCC has already banned the use of such equipment in U.S. networks that get subsidy money from the government, but now is banning it entirely and at the FCC certification level.

The FCC has yet to complete its review of the proposed merger of Standard General and Tegna, but the deal has gotten the OK from “team telecom.” That is the informal title of the interagency committee that reviews deals involving foreign participation in the U.S. communications market for national security and law enforcement concerns, if any.

The FCC has released its first draft of a new broadband availability map meant to more accurately represent broadband coverage as the Biden administration pushes tens of billions of dollars toward its universal broadband pledge.

Various unions, communications and otherwise, are pushing Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Commerce Committee chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) to take whatever action necessary to use the lame-duck session of Congress to advance to a vote on the long-stalled nomination of Gigi Sohn for the vacant FCC seat.

She tells lawmakers she “welcomes” the chance to better protect consumers from blackouts. She expressed her view in a letter to Rhode Island’s congressional delegation, whose members had pushed the FCC to do everything it could to help resolve a retrans dispute — since resolved — between Nexstar Media Group and Verizon Communications affecting WPRI Providence.

Gigi Sohn may soon take a seat as FCC commissioner thanks to Democrats’ narrow victories in US midterm Senate races around the country, according to the financial analysts at New Street Research. If Sohn’s nomination is approved by the U.S. Senate in the coming months, Democrats would have a majority of seats at the five-member commission. That could pave the way for the FCC to reclassify Internet service providers (ISPs) as Title II carriers, a precursor to reinstating the net neutrality guidelines introduced under Democratic President Barack Obama but rejected under Republican President Donald Trump.

The FCC said it will release a first version of its long-awaited, potentially more accurate, revised broadband availability map on Nov. 18, with the Biden Administration saying it would start handing out tens of billions in broadband subsidies mid-2023 based on that presumably better location data.

The National Association of Broadcasters is looking to get the FCC to classify over-the-top video services as multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), making them subject to carriage and program-negotiation obligations.

In a new filing with the FCC, Standard General hit back hard against the arguments made by unions against its proposed acquisition of Tegna, saying the unions have made “baseless allegations” against the deal.

Given, among other things, the rise of satellite-delivered broadband as a potential competitor to terrestrial service, the FCC is creating a new Space Bureau to deal with the growing flock of birds. FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said Thursday that the FCC’s International Bureau would be reconfigured as the Space Bureau plus a standalone Office of International Affairs. The goal is to “elevate” the significance of satellite programs and policy at the agency, Rosenworcel said.

The Council on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) should take action to ban TikTok, according to Brendan Carr, one of five FCC commissioners. It’s the strongest language Carr has used to date to urge action on TikTok. With more than 200 million downloads in the U.S. alone, the popular app is becoming a form of critical information infrastructure — making the app’s ownership by a Chinese parent company a target of growing national security concern.

The FCC said it will not rescind its half-million dollar fine against Gray Television for “willfully and repeatedly” violating its prohibition on owning two of the top-four rated full-power TV stations in a market. Gray said it will take the FCC to court and expects to get the decision reversed.

One year ago today, President Biden nominated Gigi Sohn to the empty spot on the FCC. Sohn, a longtime consumer advocate who worked for the Obama-era FCC, would have given Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel the tiebreaking vote needed to reverse Trump-era deregulation of the broadband industry, restore net neutrality rules, and pursue other rulemakings opposed by the commission’s Republicans. But Sohn is still waiting for the Senate to vote on her nomination. With Senate elections happening in two weeks, it’s not clear that a vote on Sohn will ever happen.

Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab Security & Privacy Institute has come up with what it says is a better and more consumer-friendly broadband service label after the FCC sought help in coming up with the right information for its own template. The FCC has been contemplating such a label for several years and came out with a voluntary version in 2016.

Republican Reps. Elise Stefanik of New York and Mike Gallagher (Wis.) have introduced a bill, the Foreign Adversary Communications Transparency (FACT) Act, that would require the FCC to maintain a list of all licensees with “sufficient” ties to authoritarian regimes, including the Chinese Communist Party. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr says such a disclosure is overdue.