It will take roughly two years, until Q4 2019, for the FCC's new home at Sentinel Square III at 45 L St. NE to be constructed, an official connected with the project told us. Former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt keeps a swatch of the carpet that lines the agency's current Portals headquarters in his office as a memento of his involvement in that building's interior design, and it could be an interim chair or the commission's next permanent chair who will oversee the design of the work spaces in the new building.
The FCC approved Nexstar’s request for a waiver allowing it to buy Media General for $4.6 billion despite the ongoing incentive auction, and approved the deal, said an order released Wednesday by the Media Bureau and Wireless Bureau. The moves were expected (see 1701030054). The Media Bureau and Wireless Bureau granted the waiver allowing the deal to proceed because of the unusual circumstances that Media General was still enmeshed in negotiations with unsuccessful prospective buyer Meredith when it reached the deal with Nexstar, a situation that caused the deal to be filed too late to be approved before the auction. Nexstar certified it will be bound by Media General’s decisions over its stations in the incentive auction, the order said. Stocks of both companies rose Wednesday.
Restoring the UHF discount is expected to be an early target of the next iteration of the FCC, several broadcast industry officials and an FCC official told us. Reversing the order doing away with it is seen as relatively simple and having wide Republican support, and as a priority for sitting Republican Commissioners Ajit Pai and Mike O’Rielly, the officials said. Though the item isn’t seen as likely to be taken up this month, it could be soon after, said numerous industry officials. Reconsideration petitions against the item already have been filed, and comments were due Tuesday. The recon proceeding will wrap up Jan. 23, a week before commissioners' first meeting under the new administration.
The FCC Media Bureau admonishment Friday evening of Scripps Media and several other broadcasters for violating political advertising disclosure rules is likely to lead to other broadcasters taking care to more closely follow the rules, though no fines were levied, said broadcast and public interest lawyers in interviews. The admonishment orders included clarifications of bureau expectations for how forms disclosing the sources of funding for political ads should be filled out. Georgetown Law Institute for Public Representation Senior Counselor Andrew Schwartzman said that would make it harder for stations to use “evasive legal arguments” to avoid following the rules going forward.
Broadcasters and public interest groups are fighting over whether the upcoming transition at the FCC and the recent holiday season are good enough reasons to extend comment deadlines on petitions to reconsider broadcast ownership rules, in several filings posted in docket 14-50 Friday. “Even in the unprecedented circumstance that every FCC staff person who has previously worked on broadcast ownership reviews accepts an assignment to a different Bureau . . . there is absolutely no reason that FCC staff newly responsible for broadcast ownership would not benefit from a fully briefed docket,” said NAB in opposition to the one-month extension requested by Prometheus Radio Project and Media Mobilizing Project. Nexstar also filed against the public interest request. The opposition filings are “ungracious posturing,” said Georgetown Law Institute for Public Representation Senior Counselor Andrew Schwartzman, who represents the public interest groups.
The FCC incentive auction Public Reporting System and its Electronic Comment Filing System experienced outages Wednesday that prevented users from accessing the auction bidding system or reading documents filed with the commission. Though ECFS' difficulties persisted into late afternoon according to several users of the system, the problems with PRS were cleared up less than 15 minutes after the Incentive Auction Task Force announced them, according to time-stamped announcements on the PRS system that have since been removed. The PRS announcement blamed the issue on internet connectivity problems. An FCC spokesman told us the problem affected about 80 documents, and was resolved by Wednesday afternoon, though it could take more time to provide access to the documents. The FCC said it is exploring the cause of the internet outage with its vendors. The spokesman said the issues are believed to be unrelated.
The FCC Media Bureau issued an order Wednesday denying reconsideration petitions that were made to the full commission and without providing any notice of the action to Republican commissioner offices, according to a released statement from Commissioners Ajit Pai and Mike O'Rielly which followed our inquiries and bureau documents. “This smacks of midnight regulation” said broadcast attorney Todd Gray of Gray Miller, who represents a group of more than 60 noncommercial TV and radio stations that appealed to the full FCC a rule change that would require the stations to provide certain additional personal information on ownership forms (see 1601200064). “I find it bizarre that the Media Bureau has the delegated authority to act on a petition addressed to the full commission,” Gray said.
Nexstar maintained through December that a waiver that would allow it to complete its $4.6 billion purchase of Media General despite the ongoing incentive auction (see 1611300064) was expected to be granted in 2016. It wasn't issued. Broadcast attorneys and pay-TV officials told us the waiver’s delay could be blamed on a range of explanations from retransmission consent negotiations to the progress of the incentive auction, and some believe the waiver request could soon be granted. There have been a number of carriage blackouts around New Year's day (see 1701030046).
An ownership dispute involving another Entercom station entitles Edward Stoltz to be a party in the FCC proceeding (see 1610280058) on Entercom's KDND(FM) Sacramento license renewal application, which the FCC designated for hearing over a 2007 radio contest that led to the death of a listener, Stolz said in opposition filings posted in docket 16-357 Wednesday. Set to be heard by Administrative Law Judge Richard Sippel in July, the case has entered its discovery phase, according to filings with the FCC. “Entercom argues that Stolz engages in a ‘twisted chain of logic,’” Stolz said in his filings appealing his exclusion from the case by the FCC. “This is comically ironic, since Entercom is the twisted party here,” Stolz said.
The FCC's 2016 nationwide test of the emergency alert system showed the system to be “significantly improved” from the 2011 nationwide test, said a preliminary report on the test released Wednesday by the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau. “The Nationwide EAS Test was successful,” said the bureau. “Initial test data indicates that the vast majority of EAS Participants successfully received and retransmitted the National Periodic Test (NPT) code that was used for the test.”