Media General CEO George Mahoney met with FCC Commissioner Jessica...
Media General CEO George Mahoney met with FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel and an aide to talk about how joint sales and shared services agreements can benefit the public interest. Such agreements would become attributable ownership stakes under draft FCC media…
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ownership rules (CD Nov 15 p1). Mahoney talked about how Media General has added more than four hours of local news and a half hour of locally originated programming at Schurz Communications’s WAGT Augusta, Ga., where Media General owns WJBF, after it began selling ads and providing other services for the station in 2010, an ex parte notice said (http://xrl.us/bn94dv). Media General also added more local news and locally originated programming to WAGT’s multicast stream, and increased the amount of such programming on WJBF’s main and multicast channels. “The Commission should not make JSAs attributable,” the notice said. If the FCC wants to keep its plan to make them attributable, it should open a new proceeding to develop a full record on the issue, the company said. If the commission moves forward with the plan without loosening restrictions on how many stations in a market one licensee can own, it should set up an exemption or waiver process based on the amount of local news and locally originated programming carried on JSA stations, it said. “Such an exemption would encourage programming improvements ... that would otherwise very likely be absent because of the frequently poor pre-JSA financial condition of brokered stations.” A JSA waiver process has been under consideration at the agency (CD Dec 27 p1).