Gray Television agreed to buy KEVN-TV (Fox) Rapid City, S.D., from Mission TV for $7.75 million, Gray said in a news release Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1jiJxDj). The transaction also includes KEVN’s satellite station KIVV-TV Lead. KEVN is the No. 2-ranked TV station in the Rapid City market, and Gray’s first “stand-alone full-power Fox affiliate,” said the acquirer. Gray has recently announced deals to buy other stations in the region from Hoak Media: An ABC affiliate in Sioux Falls, S.D., and the NBC affiliates in Fargo and MinotBismarck, N.D. The KEVN deal needs regulatory approval and is expected to close in Q1 or Q2, said the acquirer.

Update the E-rate program now, 26 members of the House told all five FCC commissioners in a letter dated Wednesday. The House sponsors of the letter -- Reps. Jared Polis, D-Colo.; Chris Gibson, R-N.Y.; Jared Huffman, D-Calif.; Don Young, R-Alaska; and Suzan DelBene, D-Wash. -- sought colleagues’ signatures for a draft of the letter earlier in December (CD Dec 10 p10). “We ask the Commission for swift action to bring high-speed broadband to our students on an expedited basis,” said the final copy of the letter, advocating for school broadband speeds of 100 Mbps now and 1 Gbps by 2017. The letter included several recommendations, such as that the FCC should create an “update fund within the E-rate program to connect every school and library, particularly those in rural areas, to high-speed broadband.” The FCC should up its transparency and accountability and simplify its paperwork, the letter said. The agency has been in the process of updating the E-rate program in recent months, and President Barack Obama has also voiced support for updates, calling the initiative ConnectEd. A spokeswoman for DelBene told us the letter would have been sent to the agency Wednesday.

A total of 189.2 million Americans watched 47.1 billion online content videos in November, said comScore Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1cz5XHe). Views of video ads totaled 26.8 billion, said the report. Google Sites were the top “online video content property” with 163.5 million unique viewers, driven primarily by YouTube, the report said. AOL ranked second with 73 million viewers, followed by Facebook (66.2 million), News Distribution Network (51 million) and Yahoo (45.8 million), said the report.

The FCC Media Bureau granted a Comcast petition Tuesday to exempt the cable provider from municipal rate-setting for basic-video and some other prices for 39 communities in California, said a Media Bureau order (http://bit.ly/1bYgizW). Comcast’s petition cited video competition from DirecTV and Dish Network. The deregulation affects just under 600,000 California households, including the communities of Roseville, Salinas and Santa Rosa.

The House bill known as the Next Generation Television Marketplace Act is a “promising vehicle for comprehensive free market reform,” Free State Foundation Adjunct Senior Fellow Seth Cooper said in a Tuesday blog post (http://bit.ly/19b9fp1). HR-3720 would “finally eliminate outdated legacy video regulations that rest on an early 1990s snapshot picture of the video market” and “repeal retrans consent regulations and allow negotiations for carriage of TV broadcast stations to take place in a deregulated and truly free market context,” Cooper said, calling it the “proper direction for reform.” The bill was introduced last week by Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., to a variety of reactions as to its strength and prospects for next year (CD Dec 16 p10). NAB opposes the bill.

A House bill asks for better disclosure from the intelligence community. Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., introduced HR-3779 Monday, and it was referred to the House Intelligence Committee. His co-sponsor is Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a backer of surveillance law updates. Both are members of the Intelligence Committee. The bill text is not yet posted online, and neither the office of Himes nor Schiff was able to provide it to us Tuesday. The bill’s long title said the legislation would “require the Director of National Intelligence to annually submit reports on violations of law or executive order by personnel of the intelligence community, and for other purposes.” Members of Congress have debated intelligence community violations in their examination of surveillance law this session.

Common Cause backed the FCC pulling a draft media ownership order circulated by then-Chairman Julius Genachowski that was a “bad idea to allow billionaire moguls to control even more of our media,” said the nonprofit on its blog Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1jfr7Df). It said current Chairman Tom Wheeler deserves credit for saying the draft will be reworked. The order, which would have allowed some types of broadcaster-newspaper cross ownership while attributing some TV station resource sharing deals in a way that might have curtailed them, was yanked from circulation earlier this month (CD Dec 16 p1). “It was an ugly dinosaur still stalking the Commission’s hallways long after it should have been extinct,” said Special Adviser to the Media and Democracy Reform Initiative Michael Copps, a former Democratic commissioner. “Maybe, just maybe, the new FCC will go on from here to become a true protector of the people’s interest on the people’s airwaves.”

Several lawmakers praised Monday’s ruling by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that National Security Agency phone surveillance likely violates the Fourth Amendment (CD Dec 17 p3). Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Mark Udall, D-Colo., praised the ruling on Monday. But Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., pointed to other legal support for surveillance and said the Supreme Court must resolve the question. “Clearly we have competing decisions from those of at least three different courts (the FISA Court, the D.C. District Court and the Southern District of California),” Feinstein said in a statement Tuesday (http://1.usa.gov/19QvjQn). “I have found the analysis by the FISA Court, the Southern District of California and the position of the Department of Justice, based on the Supreme Court decision in [1979’s Smith v. Maryland], to be compelling.” Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., author of the original Patriot Act and the surveillance overhaul the USA Freedom Act, said the decision “highlights the need to pass” his legislation, according to his office (http://1.usa.gov/1bMrU8n). “I am encouraged by the district court’s ruling,” Sensenbrenner said. “It will add to the growing momentum behind the USA FREEDOM Act, which has garnered support from a large, diverse bloc of my colleagues and the business community. The Executive Branch should join Congress to institute meaningful reform.” Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Tom Udall, D-N.M., Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., support the ruling and back updates to surveillance law. The ruling “hits the nail on the head,” Wyden said (http://1.usa.gov/1gD2yOA), in particular highlighting the ruling’s emphasis on the ineffectiveness of the surveillance. “This ruling dismisses the use of an outdated Supreme Court decision affecting rotary phones as a defense.” Paul said the ruling is “an important first step in having the constitutionality of government surveillance programs decided in the regular court system rather than a secret court where only one side is presented,” calling phone surveillance an abuse (http://1.usa.gov/18Oxu6G). “Today’s ruling is an important first step toward reining in this agency but we must go further,” Sanders said (http://1.usa.gov/IRlBX6). “I will be working as hard as I can to pass the strongest legislation possible to end the abuses by the NSA and other intelligence agencies.” Blumenthal backed congressional action, “creating greater transparency and a special advocate whose client is the Constitution to advocate on behalf of Americans’ liberty and privacy,” he said (http://1.usa.gov/1hYbYEO). Tom Udall said he hopes Monday’s “ruling will prove to be an important milestone on the path toward increased transparency and comprehensive reforms to our surveillance programs, including an end to bulk phone record collection and the creation of a new privacy advocate within the secretive FISA court” (http://1.usa.gov/18SLmQl). Privacy advocates and Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor responsible for the surveillance leaks earlier this year, also hailed the ruling.

FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn emphasized channel sharing for participants in the broadcast spectrum incentive auction. “Broadcasters get to participate in the auction, receive auction proceeds, stay on the air and continue to serve their audiences,” she said last week at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting board meeting. Stations may choose how to share their 6 MHz of bandwidth and noncommercial stations may channel share with commercial stations, she said. The broadcast TV industry “has been, and should continue to be, an important means of meeting the critical information needs of our nation’s communities,” she said. The auctions will be voluntary and the FCC must make reasonable efforts during the channel repack “to preserve the coverage area and population served of each broadcast television licensee,” she said. “Of course, the forward auction will not be a success unless a sufficient number of broadcast television stations participate.” Clyburn also commended the public broadcasting community for its involvement in the American Graduate Program and the Ready to Learn program.

The administration’s nominee for Central Intelligence Agency general counsel does not personally believe phone surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment, she told the Senate. The Senate Intelligence Committee held an open hearing Tuesday reviewing the nomination of Caroline Diane Krass, currently principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, to be CIA general counsel. Multiple senators quizzed her on Monday’s Klayman v. Obama district court ruling that National Security Agency phone surveillance likely violates the Fourth Amendment (CD Dec 17 p3). Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, raised the question early on. “I haven’t had a chance to study it carefully,” but the decision reflects the battle over the “appropriate balance” being sought in surveillance law, Krass told him of the ruling. Congress appears poised for “legislative response” and she would follow any laws enacted, she said. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, followed up: “I want to ask your personal opinion of whether or not you agree with the judge’s decision.” Krass did not agree, she said. “I have a different view of the Fourth Amendment,” one in which phone metadata are not protected, Krass said, calling the 1979 Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Maryland “good law.” That case has lent legal backing to the U.S. treatment of metadata. She did say much has changed since then and some of those factors are “worth considering.” In written answers to Senate Intelligence questions submitted before the hearing, Krass said she’s not “personally familiar with the CIA’s Attorney General Approved-procedures” on the collection, retention or dissemination of data on U.S. citizens but would make the question a priority if necessary. At the hearing, Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., reiterated an earlier statement. “I welcome a Supreme Court review,” Feinstein said. “It’s been more than 30 years” since Smith v. Maryland, she said, telling the nominee, “I think your position is really most important in this. … You are going to encounter some heat from us in that regard.” It’s hard to exercise oversight if the legality is murky, Feinstein said. King said “secret agencies tend toward abuse” and told Krass to be an advocate for the people of the U.S., not the director of the CIA or director of national intelligence.