Anti-Pirate Activity Rebounds from 2015 Nadir

FCC Anti-pirate Enforcement Actions in 2016 by stateThough not by much, and certainly not along the lines of what we saw at the beginning of this decade. August was a busy month for FCC field agents, who conducted nearly three dozen enforcement actions against fewer than half as many stations. The state-leader this year so far is Florida – while New York still leads the all-time pack enforcement action-wise – and the FCC’s flexed its muscle in only seven states, compared to 10 in 2015.
Some of the cases are fairly curious, such as a $15,000 Notice of Apparent Liability issued against a Florida man who first started broadcasting without a license way back in 2013. One visit that year, followed by four visits last year (and a change in frequency), finally compelled the FCC to bring the threat of a fiscal penalty to bear.
Then there’s the case of an Alabama man who first hit the FCC’s radar in 2015; after being warned he voluntarily surrendered his transmitter via mail, only to get a new one and move to a new channel. When contacted again by the federales, he expressed the wish that he could be legal but no application windows for LPFMs are in the works, so his “hands were tied.” Not a good enough excuse to avoid a $15,000 NAL…but then again, it remains to be seen whether the FCC will formalize these as actual forfeitures, much less be able to collect on them. Continue reading “Anti-Pirate Activity Rebounds from 2015 Nadir”

Paper Tiger Warns: Don't Do Business With Pirates

With unlicensed broadcast operations taking place with impunity in several of the nation’s largest media markets, and facing near-emasculation in the field, the Federal Communications Commission is taking a new tack to try and ameliorate the “pirate problem.”
A letter co-signed by all five Commissioners was mailed out last week to several local government and industry trade groups, including the U.S. Conference of Mayors, National Association of Chiefs of Police, Association of National Advertisers, and National Association of Realtors, among several others.
This letter seeks to inform the recipients about who pirate stations are and asks that they avoid doing business with them. The letter claims that unlicensed broadcasters “can cause harmful interference to licensed radio broadcasters serving their communities, thereby starving stations of their ability to reach their listening audiences and obtain necessary advertising revenues.” It also claims that pirate stations have the potential to interfere with public-safety radio systems.
The tone is slightly admonishing: the recipients are informed that they “may be unknowingly or unintentionally providing aid to pirate stations. . .including buying advertising on such stations to housing the physical stations themselves.” The Commissioners hint that this may expose them to “potential FCC enforcement or other legal actions,” and cautions that being in business with a pirate station may also “sully the reputations of those businesses with the licensed broadcast community and other professional organizations” – sort of a “Scarlet P” approach. Continue reading “Paper Tiger Warns: Don't Do Business With Pirates”

Abusing the Bully Pulpit

It’s common for members of the Federal Communications Commission to use their positions as bully pulpits for favored causes. For example, Frieda Hennock (the agency’s first female Commissioner) pressed for an expansion of noncommercial broadcasting in the United States. Former Chairman Mark Fowler spoke loudly and often from the bully pulpit, decrying the regulation of media more broadly and precipitating the wildly neoliberal paradigm that has captured contemporary regulation.
More recently, Chairman William Kennard spoke out against media consolidation by advocating for the creation of the LPFM radio service, while Commissioner Mignon Clyburn spearheaded a drive to drastically reduce the rates for making calls from prisons, among many other initiatives during her stint as interim Chair.
But sometimes the bully pulpit provides a way to dissent from agency practices, the idea being that public scrutiny may pressure some change from within. Former Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein were famous for touring the country and holding public hearings to learn what actual Americans thought about the state of their media environment. Continue reading “Abusing the Bully Pulpit”