Broadcasters must be able to report the news without government retaliation and need the FCC to scrap ownership limits, said NAB President Curtis LeGeyt during a Media Institute speech Wednesday. “Our democracy relies on journalists’ ability to report the news without the risk of government retribution,” he said. “Efforts to limit the ability of broadcasters to report the facts hinders the public’s right to know and chills free speech.” The FCC should eliminate the national ownership cap, or it risks damaging emergency alerting and local news, LeGeyt added. “Without a necessary course correction in our ability to compete for local advertising, local newsrooms will continue to downsize, robbing the community of its voice," he said. “Eliminating these regulations will allow local stations to aggregate resources, invest in journalism and strengthen their service to communities.”

Broadcasters’ legal challenge of the FCC’s 2018 quadrennial review (QR) order is set for oral argument in the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on March 19, said a filing in docket 24-1380 Friday. Petitioners Zimmer Radio, Nexstar, NAB, Beasley Media and Tri-State Communications have argued that the order violated the Communications Act because it didn’t roll back any broadcast ownership rules and ignored the increased competition faced by broadcasters. The FCC has previously argued in the case that the law doesn’t compel it to deregulate and that broadcasters haven’t shown that they face competition in local programming, but that could change under the agency’s new leadership. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr dissented from the QR order as a commissioner, calling its view of competition “ostrich-like.” Earlier this month, the agency kicked off oral argument over workforce diversity data collection by announcing it wouldn’t defend portions of the order (see 2502040061), which Carr also opposed as a commissioner.

“There is an obvious public interest in there being live media coverage of police street activity,” said Cato Institute Senior Fellow Walter Olson in a blog post Tuesday about the FCC’s investigation of a radio station that reported on Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids (see 2502050051). “Allowing the media to be scared away from reporting on police raids” takes the country “closer to a society where the media dare not report in real time on police raids at all, or even to one in which there might happen secret raids.” Media reporting “can expose bad practices by police, and it can also reassure by helping to establish that police practice was proper,” he said. The FCC’s investigation of the station “inevitably invites comparison with other speech-chilling steps taken under the new chairmanship of Brendan Car,” he added, pointing to the FCC’s investigation of CBS over news distortion (see 2502120041). “Vigilance is always in order when it comes to the FCC and speech rights, and perhaps more now than ever.”

The FCC’s authority to regulate broadcast content is based on the scarcity of spectrum, but that authority is unconstitutional because spectrum’s scarcity doesn’t differentiate it from other resources such as land or oil, wrote Joe Kane, director-broadband and spectrum policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, in an essay the Federalist Society posted Tuesday. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s actions (see 2502050063) to investigate broadcasters over their content “are permitted within the current state of the law” because of court rulings that broadcasters enjoy fewer First Amendment protections due to spectrum’s scarcity, Kane said. “Those cases, and therefore the FCC’s authority to regulate the content transmitted over radio waves, are based on fundamental fallacies,” he wrote. “Land is scarce, but the fact that the government has granted or auctioned deeds doesn’t permit it to regulate the content of what landowners say.” The law also doesn’t apply the rationale of spectrum scarcity evenly, Kane pointed out. Wi-Fi signals are just as susceptible to interference as broadcast radio signals, he said. “Yet no one would countenance content-based control of all wireless internet traffic, even though the scarcity rationale would apply identically to those types of transmissions.” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas questioned the validity of the spectrum scarcity rationale in his concurrence in FCC v. Fox, Kane said. “Do his colleagues agree?” he asked. “Spectrum is not so special a medium that it should be carved out of the First Amendment,” he wrote. “To the extent that any FCC action or any part of the Communications Act relies on the inverse assumption, it is unconstitutional.”

CBS’ editing of an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris last November “looks like editorial judgment, not an instance of splicing footage to create a misleading response that never happened,” and the FCC probe into CBS isn’t justified by the previous administration’s action against Fox, the Wall Street Journal editorial board said in a column Sunday. News Corp. owns the WSJ and Fox. In a recent interview, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr pointed to the previous FCC’s proceeding on WTXF Philadelphia as setting the precedent for the agency’s current news distortion investigation against CBS (see 2502060059).

Minority Television Project has reached a $25,000 settlement with the FCC over filing violations by KMTP-TV San Francisco, its noncommercial educational station, said a consent decree in Friday’s Daily Digest. KMTP filed its issues/programs list late, failed to report that violation to the FCC, and then was also untimely in filing its license renewal application, the consent decree said. Under the terms of the decree, the agency has granted KMTP’s license renewal for two years, during which time the station is required to implement a compliance plan and new training procedures.

The FCC has added additional video to the CBS news distortion docket (25-73), said a public notice Friday (see 2502050063). “Placement of this additional material in the docket will allow for the development of a more comprehensive record and enhance public input.” The additional video appears to be further footage of the 60 Minutes interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris that CBS released Wednesday. “The inclusion of this additional material in the record does not change the pleading cycle or filing procedures,” the notice said.

The FCC doesn’t have plans to withdraw or revise its Form 395-B data collection despite the agency opting not to defend language in the order recognizing nonbinary gender (see 2502040061), the FCC told the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a letter in docket 24-60219 Wednesday. “There therefore remains a live controversy between the parties over the order’s lawfulness.” The letter appears to be a response to concerns judges raised during oral argument Tuesday that the FCC could act to withdraw or moot the case while the court is working on an opinion. Broadcast attorneys told us this week they were concerned the court might opt not to rule on the order in the wake of the FCC’s decision not to defend part of it.

FCC rules against payola bar radio broadcasters from receiving payment for more favorable airplay, even in the form of reduced fees for live performances at station-run concerts, warned the FCC Enforcement Bureau in an advisory Thursday. “Some radio stations appear to be violating the FCC's prohibition on Payola by surreptitiously forcing musicians to choose between (1) performing for free (or for reduced fees) at station events or (2) losing out on valuable radio airplay,” said FCC Chairman Brendan Carr in a post on X. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., sent a letter to Carr last week asking the FCC to look into the practice (see 2502040062). The advisory said the agency will hold stations that report to record-charting services -- and are thus more susceptible to payola -- to a higher standard on policing the activities of employees than it would a station with an all-news format. If the licensee of such a reporting station “does nothing more than require its employees to execute affidavits stating that they will not violate laws and regulations prohibiting payola,” that could fall short of the “reasonable diligence” the agency requires, the advisory said. Payola is also against the U.S. criminal code, so violating the rules “can subject the violator to criminal penalties of a fine of up to $10,000 or imprisonment of up to one year, or both.” The FCC “notes that licensees play a critical role in preventing payola, and the Commission’s enforcement staff will consider investigating substantive allegations of payola that come to its attention.”

The FCC’s investigation of CBS and demand for interview transcripts (see 2502050063) aren’t unprecedented because of the previous administration’s treatment of Fox’s WTXF Philadelphia, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said Thursday in an interview with Fox and Friends. “When the government's been weaponized in your favor, it feels like discrimination when all of a sudden there's even-handed treatment,” Carr said, calling critics of the CBS investigation “the radical left.” Under former Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, the FCC opened a proceeding on WTXF’s license renewal in response to a petition from the Media and Democracy Project. MAD’s petition argued that a court finding that Fox had aired false news about the 2020 election was sufficient basis for the FCC to hold a hearing on its license. The open proceeding held up WTXF’s license renewal for a year and a half, but the FCC didn’t hold a hearing, act against WTXF or act on repeated requests from MAD to include documents and court filings from defamation cases against Fox in the record. Rosenworcel rejected the MAD petition as one of her last acts as chairwoman (see 2501160081). Though Carr’s FCC resurrected the news distortion complaint against CBS and other complaints against ABC and NBC, he let the dismissal of the petition against WTXF stand (see 2501220059). “A lot of people that have been on a sort of upper road of a two-tiered system of government, and what I'm here to do is apply the law evenly,” Carr said. Former Fox and Disney lobbyist Preston Padden, who supported the MAD petition, clapped back. “Carr’s comment is pure BS,” he told us. “I believe he is pursuing the CBS complaint for one reason -- Trump wants him to.” Fox didn't comment.