Washington Beat

The President/CEO of the NAB says the nation's biggest lobbying organization representing broadcast media "is gravely concerned" by recent incidents of violence directed against broadcast journalists who are covering local news.

The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) has presented the Mark Richer Industry Leadership Medal to the former Oregon Senator who will be retiring as President/CEO of the NAB at the end of 2021.

If Congress says yes, he'll become the Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information at the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), where FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington last worked.

The AWARN Alliance has elected the chair and vice chair of its AWARN Steering Committee for 2022. The AWARN Steering Committee serves as the governing body of the AWARN Alliance.

The NAB's Distinguished Service Award is presented annually to "a broadcaster who has made a significant and lasting contribution to the American broadcasting industry." The 2022 recipient of the DSA: the man who led the NAB until his retirement at the end of 2021.

The FCC has confirmed what some across the Nation's Capital have been tweeting about since late last week: its Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) has undergone a system upgrade.

The Media Bureau has denied an Informal Objection submitted to the Commission with respect to its tentative selectee of a future noncommercial FM radio station, in a group of mutually exclusive potential licensees. As such, an application from an Arizona institution of higher learning has been selected as the tentative license holder.

In April 2017, Threshold Communications emerged as the lone bidders in a FCC auction for a brand-new FM. It then asked the Media Bureau to relocate its city of license from Columbia County, Ore., to a city in Washington due north of Longview. The Media Bureau agreed, but an interloper didn't. It was so against the move that it filed a Second Petition for Reconsideration in the hopes that the FCC would change its mind. It did not.

Without elaborating on the reasons why, the FCC has moved its November Open Meeting from its original date to a day earlier. What will be discussed at the meeting has yet to surface publicly.

The broadcast television industry's sales and advertising-focused advocacy group released preliminary data points to share from a forthcoming 2022 Voter Funnel survey looking at media’s influence on voters following the midterm election. Key California statistics were released on Thursday, ahead of a mid-December release of the full report.

In early 2018, Chuck Poppen-controlled Central Plains Media, the licensee for KCPM-27 in Grand Forks, was in the news for agreeing to sell the station to Gray Television. The licensee is tied to G.I.G. Inc., and that entity is now attracting attention. Why? It's been handed a Notice of Apparent Liability and Forfeiture for a pair of FCC violations.

When a broadcast television station is found by the FCC to have apparently willfully violated section 73.3539(a) of the Commission’s rules, there's typically a fine that is assessed to the station for its transgressions. That's the case for three TV stations.

How serious is the FCC when it comes to non-receipt of regulatory fees in a timely manner? Just ask the owner of an AM radio station in Southwestern Virginia, who must now pay up for nine years of delinquency or risk losing his license.

After two failures to file timely renewals for the 2011-2014 and 2019-2022 license cycles and subsequent expiration, the FCC and Pennsylvania’s Good Christian Broadcasting, Inc. have come to a solution to return the station license of WLIH-FM.

In response to the passage of Canada’s Online News Act, the Mark Zuckerberg-founded Meta blocked access to news on Facebook and Instagram for Canadian users. The President/CEO of the U.S.'s National Association of Broadcasters and the President of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters condemned the move while signaling their support of Ottawa.