Journal Broadcast Group and Dish Network reached a carriage agreement for Journal's stations in all of its markets. WTMJ-TV Milwaukee, WTVF Nashville, WFTX-TV Cape Coral, Florida, and other stations will remain on Dish's lineup, Journal said Thursday in a news release.

The FCC Media Bureau dismissed a petition asking it to deny the license renewal of a radio station owned by Redskins football team owner Dan Snyder, the bureau said in an order Thursday. The name of the team, often broadcast on WWXX (FM) Buckland, Virginia, is an obscenity, said objections from John Banzhaf, Louis Grimaldi, Jay Nightwolf and Verona Iriarte. Though the objections were outside the deadline to be considered as petitions to deny, the bureau considered them on the merits as informal objections, the order said. “Redskins” isn’t a sexual or excretory term, and so doesn’t meet the definition of obscenity or profanity, the order said. Objectors also said the word was a racial epithet, but the FCC doesn’t regulate the use of such words, the order said. The FCC doesn’t consider such words profanity “given constitutional considerations,” the order said. The order also rejected arguments that the FCC should deny the renewal because broadcasting the word means Snyder doesn’t meet the character requirements to be a broadcaster. The FCC can’t “deny renewal of a broadcast license because particular words or programming broadcast by the licensee offended some viewers,” the order said. WWXX (FM)’s license has been renewed, the order said. FCC officials on the eighth floor weren’t notified of the decision and learned of it from news reports, one official told us. The petitioners are weighing different options, Banzhaf said. One option is to make an appeal or ask for reconsideration, “arguing that they’ve read our petition incorrectly,” he said. There also are additional station licenses coming up all the time so “we can now benefit from the staff’s position, and my colleagues and I can go back and see if we can come up with even more theories,” he said: “It’s going to take the commission to do it, and not the staff.” The bureau staff misinterpreted several claims, including one of the major claims that the unnecessary and repetitious use of the word causes harm, he said. “Somehow they twisted that to be only psychological harm, but it’s not.”

PMCM pushed back against CBS and Meredith Corp., saying they haven’t attempted to show that PMCM’s WJLP-TV Middletown Township, New Jersey, caused any problems by use of Virtual Channel 3.10. Meredith Corp. and CBS issued a joint opposition to PMCM’s application for review of FCC Media Bureau orders on the proper virtual major channel for WJLP. That opposition “is essentially non-responsive” to PMCM’s application, PMCM said in its response posted Friday in docket 14-150. “Their failure even to attempt some, any, rebuttal may be seen as an effective concession of the correctness of PMCM’s arguments.” CBS and Meredith Corp. also fail to mention there are no fewer than 105 situations, already in place for years, “in which non-commonly-owned stations with overlapping service areas use identical two-part virtual channel numbers” in apparent violation of the A/65 ATSC standard, PMCM said.

Recent FCC actions raise the question of whether the commission is getting rid of its Mattoon waiver policy, a broadcast attorney said. The FCC now seems to be backing off the use of these waivers, which allow relocation of an FM translator for use as a fill-in translator by an AM station without requiring multiple “hops,” Wilkinson Barker attorney David Oxenford said Friday in a blog post. Last week, the commission upheld in an order an earlier staff decision to deny a request from Educational Media Foundation to move a transmitter site, and the Audio Division denied a similar request from Hope Christian Church of Marlton in New Jersey. All of the actions and the express proposal in the AM improvement proceeding suggesting that the Mattoon waiver policy may no longer be necessary “indicate that the days of this policy may be numbered,” Oxenford said. Until rules are adopted in the AM revitalization proceeding, there’s still time to file informal comments in that proceeding on the Mattoon waiver policy “if it might affect your operations,” he said.

The FCC Media Bureau approved Media General’s $1.5 billion buy of LIN Media, the bureau said in a letter released Friday. The deal was the subject of a Department of Justice consent decree in October requiring some divestitures (see 1410300060). The FCC concurred with Media General’s agreement with DOJ to divest seven stations, and considers the dissolution of several joint sales agreements to which some of the divested stations are parties to be a public interest benefit, the letter said. Though some JSAs remain in place among some of the 70-plus stations involved in the transaction, “Post-merger Media General” will have the same 2016 deadline to bring the JSAs in line with FCC attribution rules as other broadcasters, the letter said. On the closing of the deal, LIN CEO Vincent Sadusky will become CEO of post-transaction Media General, the letter said.

The FCC Media Bureau approved a Journal Communications and E.W. Scripps plan to combine their broadcast operations into one company and spin off and join their newspapers into another, according to a letter released Friday. Journal agreed to divest one of six radio stations it owns in the Wichita, Kansas, area and KNIN-TV Caldwell, Idaho, to comply with FCC ownership rules, the letter said. The divested stations will be assigned to a trust that will be required within six months to either sell the stations or, if possible, put them into the incentive auction. Otherwise, the stations licenses will be canceled, the bureau said. Scripps will also be granted a failing station waiver in the Green Bay, Wisconsin, designated market area, the letter said. The all-stock transaction will result in Scripps owning 33 TV stations and 34 radio stations, while Journal Media Group will cover 14 markets with the combined newspapers, the companies said in a July news release announcing the deal.

The STELA Reauthorization Act has extended the compliance deadline for when the FCC’s tighter restrictions on joint sales agreements will be applied, the Media Bureau said in a public notice Thursday. The FCC’s rule making attributable same-market JSAs where one licensee sells more than 15 percent of the advertising time of another will now go into effect Dec. 19, 2016 -- six months later than the two year deadline in the FCC rule. The FCC’s tighter JSA rules are part of an ongoing court challenge from NAB in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Scripps and ABC signed a new five-year affiliation agreement that covers 10 Scripps stations through 2019. Stations in Baltimore, Cleveland and San Diego are included in the agreement, Scripps said Wednesday in a news release. Scripps' recently acquired ABC affiliate in Buffalo remains under a separate agreement through 2018, it said.

The ATSC plans to release publicly Tuesday its call for proposals on audio codecs for the next-gen ATSC 3.0 broadcast system, sources close to the ATSC told us Monday. Release of the call for proposals, which had been expected for the past month (see 1411060033), is a major step toward building the audio and video compression components of ATSC 3.0. When coupled with its new physical layer, ATSC 3.0's video and audio codecs will make for a next-gen system that will be "far more efficient, far more robust and far more flexible" than the existing ATSC DTV broadcast system, its framers said. HEVC likely will be the backbone video codec for ATSC 3.0, they said. ATSC’s "S34-2" ad hoc group on ATSC 3.0 audio is charged with drafting specs that would allow an "immersive" experience, said the group’s chairman, Jim Starzynski, director and principal audio engineer at NBCUniversal Advanced Engineering, at an ATSC 3.0 "Boot Camp" conference last spring. ATSC 3.0 audio is expected to have two parts, its "personalization" aspect and its immersive home theater surround component, the ad hoc group said. For ATSC 3.0 surround, the ad hoc group for months has been "zoning in" on an object-based, height-rich format it calls "7.1 plus 4," which includes four height speakers, it has said. The announcement to be released Tuesday stresses the personalized and immersive audio experiences ATSC hopes to gain through ATSC 3.0. "Personalization includes enhancement to the control of dialog, use of alternate audio tracks and mixing of assistive audio services, other-language dialog, special commentary, and music and effects," it quotes ATSC President Mark Richer as saying. "Plus, the system will support both the normalization of content loudness and contouring of dynamic range, based on the specific capabilities of a user's fixed or mobile device and its unique sound environment." As for its "immersive audio functionality," it’s hoped ATSC 3.0 will envelop "the listener with precise sound source localization in azimuth, elevation and distance, and provides an increased sense of presence," Richer says in the announcement. "These features can be supported over the listening area, without the need for a large number of physical speakers." Systems submitted in the call for proposals "will be judged discretely and in their entirety, as comprehensive, end-to-end systems for emission of the ATSC signal," the announcement will say. It requests that proponents submit "only complete audio solutions that satisfy ATSC 3.0 system needs, because the ATSC does not intend to develop the ATSC 3.0 audio system out of independent components from multiple sources." The ATSC 3.0 audio system is expected to support audio with video content as well as audio-only content, it says.

Entercom agreed to buy Lincoln Financial Media (LFM) and its 15 radio stations from Lincoln Financial Group for $105 million plus working capital, an Entercom news release said. The agreement includes stations in Atlanta, Denver, Miami and San Diego and will bring Entercom’s total to more than 130 stations in 26 markets, the release said. The transaction is subject to FCC and Department of Justice review, and Entercom expects to divest a Denver FM station to comply with ownership rules, the release said. The company expects the deal to close in the second quarter of 2015, the release said.