The FCC fined a Spanish Broadcasting System FM station for the second...

a second Enforcement Bureau forfeiture order also dated Wednesday, fining WSKQ New York $16,000, after WZNT San Juan, Puerto Rico, was penalized $25,000 earlier that day. The bureau disagreed with the company’s rebuttal to a proposed fine that a penalty wasn’t called for because the station sought and got the person’s permission after the call was placed. “The Commission’s longstanding policy” is “that prior notification is essential to protect individuals’ legitimate expectation of privacy and to preserve their dignity by avoiding nonconsensual broadcasts of their conversations,” the order said (http://xrl.us/bnmw8x). That a vendor and not the company itself recorded the call doesn’t relieve SBS of liability, the bureau said. “We have consistently held that licensees are responsible for the programming aired on their stations and for violations of Commission rules by employees and independent contractors. To hold otherwise would allow a licensee to circumvent the Commission’s rules with impunity by simply having an agent perform, on its behalf, any acts that violate Commission rules.” An SBS spokesman had no comment. The orders to WSKQ and WZNT “each raises a number of interesting issues,” a radio lawyer uninvolved in the cases wrote Thursday. “They address and reject many defenses to the fines that were raised by the broadcaster,” David Oxenford wrote on the blog of the Wilkinson Barker law firm. That “a litany of potential defenses to the violations were rejected by the FCC” leaves “very little if any room for fighting off a fine should a station be caught having made a recorded” conversation or broadcasting “a call without permission,” he wrote (http://xrl.us/bnmw9b).