Right at about the same time the FCC granted special temporary authority to a pirate station in Nevada to operate without a license, the agency told a group of irate listeners in Texas that they, too, could have a station if they wanted to.
How? Some 263 of them wrote letters to the FCC requesting it deny the transfer of KTPB-FM’s license from a community college to the Educational Media Foundation. The well-known godcaster will flip the station’s format from classical to one of its “alternative” offerings.
Seemingly impressed by the outpouring of support for classical music, thought the FCC denied the listeners’ objections to the license transfer it entertained the option of them applying for an LPFM station license in order to “fill any programming void left by the sale of the station to EMF and change in format that EMF may make.” Continue reading “FCC Creates Another LPFM Loophole, Courts to Consider a Third”
Category: FCC
Translator Licensees Spike, Get Cited
The FCC has released year-end broadcast station totals. Of the 17,968 licensed radio stations in the nation, 4,131 (23%) are translator stations. FM translators may outnumber the number of AM stations by the end of this year; if the NAB’s proposal to give away translators to AM stations gains traction, the number of translators could quintuple.
Interestingly, the year-to-year totals of translators don’t seem to reflect the flood of new translators that have gone on the air since 2003. A recent slew of Notices of Apparent Liability released by the FCC for failure to timely renew station licenses somewhat does. Stations have been threatened with fines ranging between $1,500 and $8,500 for the infraction, with penalties inflated for those stations that technically operated without a license when their present one expired. In every case, the FCC has renewed each station’s license without further question.
FCC Enforcement Bureau Gives 2006 Overview
At its monthly meeting in January the FCC heard year-end reports and “strategic plans” from each of its primary bureaus and offices. Enforcement Bureau chief Kris Monteith reported that out of some 3,300 field investigations undertaken in 2006, the Bureau claims to have shut down “approximately” 
85 pirate radio stations. If each station is counted as its own investigation, and the Bureau’s claims are assumed to be accurate, less than 3% of the Bureau’s field-time is spent on unlicensed broadcast enforcement.
Notably, this month saw the Bureau rule on some petitions for reconsideration with regard to fines issued to pirates in the last few years, which gives a better sense of the agency’s speed and effectiveness of enforcement. For example, one ruling knocked a $10,000 fine down to $600, three years after its issuance; another $10,000 claim issued in 2003 was subsequently knocked down to $1,000 in 2004, and was just further successfully appealed to $250. Continue reading “FCC Enforcement Bureau Gives 2006 Overview”
Enforcement Action Database Cracks 1,000 Actions
Just caught up on the FCC’s last two months of activity. It’s been a busy winter: 274 enforcement actions for 2006 and counting.
This includes fines, or threats of fines, of $10,000 against the transmitter-hosts of both microstations in San Diego, though escalating the enforcement process up to that level of severity remains mostly outside the FCC’s standard protocol (in related news, the agency’s Inspector General is planning an audit of its regulatory fee-collection process, something not done since 1999). Continue reading “Enforcement Action Database Cracks 1,000 Actions”
Microradio, Today and Tomorrow
FCC Commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps were in Seattle on November 30th to take more public testimony on the agency’s ongoing media ownership rules review. Reclaim the Media, packed the main auditorium of the Seattle Public Library and provided the Commissioners with four hours’ worth of testimony.
Just two weeks before the FCC’s visit, RtM also organized the Northwest Community Radio Summit, which featured three days of workshops on a wide range of issues. One of those was on 
“The Case for Free Radio in the 21st Century” (1:00:34, 10.4 MB), hosted by members of the Free Radio Olympia collective. It provided a short overview of the history of unlicensed broadcasting and some of the more popular rationales for why it’s still advantageous to be a radio pirate in a post-LPFM world. Continue reading “Microradio, Today and Tomorrow”
News Potpourri
A confluence of busyness this semester has swept aside my site-update time. I’m almost caught up with the major stuff, though the regularity of updates will remain slow for the foreseeable future, and more general site-maintenance is on hiatus. Which is funny, because back when this site actually paid for itself, I only updated it about once a week, though it was a lot smaller lo those nearly ten years ago.
That being said, here’s a highlight of things that are now up to speed: Continue reading “News Potpourri”
Some Corporate Airwave Piracy Gets Its Due
Last year the FCC issued several Notices of Apparent Liability to several cross-border companies in southern California. These companies were using unlicensed microwave data links to connect corporate and production facilities. Recently the FCC finally formalized the forfeitures against most of them. Continue reading “Some Corporate Airwave Piracy Gets Its Due”
Enforcement Action Database Revamp
Sparked by an interview done for this story, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks conducting a much-needed audit of the Enforcement Action Database. The biggest changes involved harmonizing the counting methodology from year-to-year, and correcting scattered counting errors collected over a decade of compilation.
However, the revised figures show no significant change in the trends of late: more administrative penalties, less overall muscle, and the proliferation of stations continues. I will be the first to admit to sucking at math. Continue reading “Enforcement Action Database Revamp”
FCC FM Auction Announced
The FCC is soliciting comment on rules to govern an upcoming auction of 124 full-power FM station construction permits around the country. These channels are on the commercial portion of the FM dial; the action is set to commence on March 7.
It will be interesting to see if our translator-mongering friends will make a killing in this buying spree. Remember that it is part of their business plan to convert FM translator construction permits into cash, and use the cash to buy full-power FM stations (or station construction permits) from which to feed RAM/EB/WRL’s own network. This auction may very well usher in phase two of the ongoing invasion of godcasters onto the FM dial.
FCC Report-Spiking Redux
As if last week’s bombshell did not do enough to tarnish the legitimacy of the FCC, now comes word that a second media ownership study did not see the light of day back during the agency’s last go-round on the subject.
The funny thing is, this newly-unearthed report – 
“Review of the Radio Industry” – doesn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already know, which is how consolidation has decimated radio since the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. When regulators find themselves threatened to the point where they go out of their way to cover up the obvious, you know things are f*cked up to an insane degree. Continue reading “FCC Report-Spiking Redux”