Discussion of FCC, copyright, advertising and other legal issues of importance to radio and television broadcasters and other media companies
Principal Editor: David O’Connor
Here are some of the regulatory developments of significance to broadcasters from the last week, with links to where you can go to find more information as to how these actions may affect your operations.
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A flurry of fines against broadcasters have come out of the FCC in the last week. These fines highlight the scrutiny under which owners of broadcast stations can find themselves should an FCC Field Office inspector knock on their door. If the FCC pays a visit and finds a violation, a station is often looking at a fine even if it quickly takes corrective action. Let’s look at some of these fines and the issues raised by each.
First, a Regional Director of the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau yesterday released a $17,000 Forfeiture Order (a notice of a fine) to a Michigan AM broadcaster for having a fence around its tower that had “separated” allowing unfettered access to the site and for missing quarterly issues programs lists in the public file. The FCC refused to lower the fine, despite the licensee’s arguments that the quarterly issues programs lists were in fact at the station but there was “confusion” as to where they were at the time of the inspection, and its argument that it should not be responsible for the fencing issue as it did not itself own the real estate or the towers.
Continue Reading FCC Fines: $17,000 for Unsecure AM Tower Fence (Not Owning the Tower Site is No Excuse); $25,000 for Missing Quarterly Issues Programs Lists; $22,000 for Nonfunctioning EAS and Wrong Tower Coordinates
In a recent decision, the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau ruled that a tower owner should pay a fine for a single day where the required tower lights were not operational, and where no required monitoring of the tower to discover such outage was taking place. On top of the penalty for the non-working lights, the FCC also fined the owner for the failure to report a change in ownership of the tower. The total fine in the case was $4000 (reduced from an initial fine of $13,000 because of the tower owner’s past record of compliance).
As with any FCC fine, while the fine was for one day of tower light outage, there was more to the story. The FCC inspected the tower after receiving a complaint stating that the lights were out on a day that was almost a month before the inspection – indicating that the outage may have been in place for far longer than the one day revealed by the FCC inspection. The tower owner admitted that the person who was supposed to conduct the required daily inspection of the tower lights had moved from the area in which the tower was located, and the owner did not know exactly when that occurred. The owner did not get someone new to do the inspection until after the FCC inspection. And the tower had no automatic monitoring system to determine if the lights were in fact operational. With these admissions, it seemed clear that there was the potential that there had been a problem for a long time, so perhaps the fine was not unexpected, even though the lights were fixed within hours of the FCC report of the problem, as the issue was a simple one that the tower owner blamed on a careless repair person who had recently visited the site.Continue Reading Tower Lights Out for Even One Day? – Pay A Fine, Says the FCC
The FCC recently released a decision granting two waivers of its requirement that any communications tower which has lighting requirements and is registered with the FCC be visually inspected at least quarterly to insure that all of the required lights are working. The waivers were granted to American Tower Corporation and Global Signal, Inc., both operators of…
