FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, in her first tenure at the agency, famously noted in a dissenting opinion on the end of the Commission’s Main Studio Rule that a lack of a locally based studio operation could lead to a failure in bringing pertinent emergency communication to the community for which it is licensed to serve.
The market Rosenworcel used as an example was Minot, S.D. The cluster of stations she used is owned by iHeartMedia, which at the time of a January 18, 2002, train disaster was known as Clear Channel Communications.
That cluster is now grabbing one of its own former stations it needed to put into the trust led by Barry Drake in order to comply with local ownership caps.
