Tegna Settles Indecency Issue for $222,500
Tegna has agreed to a $222,500 settlement with the FCC over an Oct. 2021 incident where a 13-second clip of pornographic material was played on a monitor visible behind an anchor during an evening news weather segment, said an order…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
and consent decree in Thursday’s Daily Digest. Tegna told the FCC that an unknown person used the monitor’s screencasting feature to transmit and display the material while on a legacy wireless network that, unknown to the station's IT team, didn’t require a password. After the incident, Tegna deactivated the network, disabled screencasting on all monitors at all its stations and began requiring that all new monitors be installed without Wi-Fi capabilities, the consent decree said. Under its terms, Tegna agreed to create a compliance plan and file compliance reports with the FCC for the next three years. In 2016, then-Schurz-owned WDBJ Roanoke, Virginia, paid a $325,000 FCC forfeiture after it aired an image that contained pornography during a news story about a firefighter’s adult film career (see 1604040057). Schurz appealed the amount but eventually paid in order to close its sale to Gray Television.