city of license change
This Week in Regulation for Broadcasters: April 7, 2025 to April 11, 2025
- The NAB and SoundExchange filed with the Copyright Royalty Board a proposed settlement of the pending litigation over the 2026-2030
This Week in Regulation for Broadcasters: March 17, 2025 to March 21, 2025
- FCC Commissioner Starks announced that he informed President Trump and Senator Minority Leader Schumer (D-NY) that he will resign his
This Week in Regulation for Broadcasters: March 3, 2025 to March 7, 2025
- The FCC released a draft Notice of Inquiry to explore how the FCC can support industry efforts to develop new
This Week in Regulation for Broadcasters: February 24, 2025 to February 28, 2025
- The National Association of Broadcasters filed a Petition for Rulemaking asking the FCC to require that full-power television stations complete
This Week in Regulation for Broadcasters: November 11, 2024 to November 15, 2024
- The FCC announced that comments are due January 13, 2025, in response to proposed community of license changes for several
FCC Applies Rural Radio Policy to Block Move of Silent AM Station to New City of License – Do We Still Need a Rural Radio Policy?
Our recent posts have been obsessed with the FCC’s regulatory fees and the issues with the CORES fee filing system miscomputing the fees for many radio stations (an issue that seemingly has now been resolved so that payments can be made by the September 26 deadline). In doing so, we have minimized our coverage of some of the other interesting decisions and regulatory activity from the FCC and other agencies that affect broadcasters. One of those actions involved the proposal of a now-silent AM station to move from the small Alabama community of Bay Minette, Alabama to another small Alabama community, Spanish Fork. The Commission issued a letter saying that they could not grant the application as the proposal would move the station from a rural area to a community within an urbanized area – the Fairhope-Daphne urbanized area. The FCC found that this move would violate the FCC’s rural radio policy unless a showing could be made that there were public interest reasons to rebut the application of the policy in this case. The letter gave the applicant 30 days to attempt to rebut the presumption against the move.
The rural radio policy was adopted more than a decade ago to, in theory, preserve program diversity in rural areas by restricting the move of radio stations into more urbanized areas through community of license changes. The policy restricts rural stations from changing their city of license to a location from which the station could place a principal city contour over 50% of any urbanized area (see our articles here and here for more details on this policy). As the proposed move in the Alabama case would allow the AM to cover more than 50% of the Fairhope-Daphne urbanized area with its proposed new 2 mv/m contour, the change would be prohibited unless a special showing can be made overcoming the presumption against such moves, even though the move would allow the AM station to cover over 250,000 more people than it currently does. The Commission notes that it also disfavors removing a second local service (a service licensed to a particular community) from a community of over 7,500 people. As Bay Minette has over 7,500 people, and the town has only one other existing radio station, the move of the AM station would also run afoul of this policy. These presumptions are very difficult, if not impossible, to overcome absent some showing that the FCC’s technical analysis is incorrect. Continue Reading FCC Applies Rural Radio Policy to Block Move of Silent AM Station to New City of License – Do We Still Need a Rural Radio Policy?
The Past Two Weeks in Regulation for Broadcasters: August 26, 2024 to September 6, 2024
- The FCC released its Second Report and Order setting the annual regulatory fees that broadcasters must pay for 2024.
This Week in Regulation for Broadcasters: June 24, 2024 to June 28, 2024
- The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the longstanding Chevron doctrine, which required Courts to defer to expert regulatory agencies, like the
This Week in Regulation for Broadcasters: January 22, 2024 to January 26, 2024
- The FCC released its agenda for its Open Meeting scheduled for February 15. The FCC will consider two items of