A law firm with Class A TV station clients took aim...
A law firm with Class A TV station clients took aim at the FCC for revoking that designation from two stations it doesn’t represent and removing their interference protection when the licensee was dead (CD April 27 p15). Separately Friday,…
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the Media Bureau revoked the Class A status of four stations, making eight total it’s rendered regular low-power TV outlets. In Friday’s blog titled “Dead Men File No KidVid Reports,” Fletcher Heald broadcast lawyer Davina Sashkin said “the Commission’s seemingly all-consuming urge to free up as much TV spectrum as possible for ‘repurposing'” led the Media Bureau’s Video Division to take “Class A authorizations back from a dead guy” -- Humberto Lopez -- who didn’t keep kids’ programming reports for several years. Lopez was among the licensees for the four stations that lost Class A status on Friday. Unlike most such applications, a request of the estate to assign the two LPTV licensees to the executor, “routinely granted in a matter of days,” is pending five months after it was made, Sashkin wrote (http://xrl.us/bm5cy8). “Until that application is granted, Mr. Lopez technically remains the licensee, and his executor (who is not the licensee) is technically not in a position to respond to inquiries directed to the licensee.” A bureau spokeswoman reiterated that the estate’s executor was given a chance to respond to the FCC inquiries and did not. The stations losing interference protection in Friday’s bureau orders are KBBL Springfield, Mo. (http://xrl.us/bm5c82), WBGR Bangor/Dedham, Maine (http://xrl.us/bm5c88), and in Texas KXTM San Antonio (http://xrl.us/bm5c9a) licensed to Lopez and KWDT Corpus Christi (http://xrl.us/bm5c9g). All four stations didn’t keep kids’ programming reports and didn’t respond to repeated bureau requests for information, the orders said. Some clients of Fletcher Heald, and of other law firms, are responding to show-cause orders issued recently by the bureau saying the Class A’s faced the loss of interference protection, Sashkin told us.