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"David Eduardo" wrote in message ... "Sid Schweiger" wrote in message ... Then there was WHDH....RKO...these were financial shenanigans, if I remember correctly. So not a one lost a license based on "fitness". The WHDH case stemmed from an improper contact between a representative of an applicant for a TV license in Boston and an FCC commissioner (chronicled in Sterling Quinlan's book "The Hundred Million Dollar Lunch"). And that was in the general area that rendered RKO lacking the character qualifications to hold a license. In other words, "fitness." Add the General Tire dealings in Libya and Argentina, and you got the required divestiture of the remaining RKO properties. Okay, okay, so "fitness" relates to a number of qualities. I get you there. What I was differentiating, though, was how a licensee could be "unfit" simply by airing content not considered conventional or even valid....the other misfeasances, criminal and otherwise, can certainly make a licensee unfit, but there are bigger issues with those failures than simply giving a soapbox for goofs. Long ago (late 60s? Certainly early 70s) the FCC made it abundantly clear (in the course of a station sale and license transfer) that they would have no opinion on an expected format change with the news owners (I think the station was classical, and its loss was considered by its audience to be unacceptable). Frankly, I still don't see what's so wrong with requiring a licensee to accomodate a community's needs (after all, aside from that little condition, the station is free to make as much money with the license as it can) but this clearly will never happen here so long as the First Amendment is considered to encompass in toto the operation of a broadcast outlet. It's free speech we're guaranteed, and until broadcasters give out airtime for free, that's not free speech. --------------------------------------- Nothin' ain't worth nothin' if it ain't free. --------------------------------------- For direct replies, take out the contents between the hyphens. -Really!- |
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"Bob Haberkost" wrote in message ...
Okay, okay, so "fitness" relates to a number of qualities. I get you there. What I was differentiating, though, was how a licensee could be "unfit" simply by airing content not considered conventional or even valid....the other misfeasances, criminal and otherwise, can certainly make a licensee unfit, but there are bigger issues with those failures than simply giving a soapbox for goofs. Long ago (late 60s? Certainly early 70s) the FCC made it abundantly clear (in the course of a station sale and license transfer) that they would have no opinion on an expected format change with the news owners (I think the station was classical, and its loss was considered by its audience to be unacceptable). That was WEFM in Chicago, generally considered the world's first commercial FM station and a longtime home for classical music. Zenith Radio decided that they didn't need to run the station as a loss leader to promote sales of FM radios and sold it to General Cinema, who then announced that they were going to flip it to Top 40. Even though there were two other FM signals programming full-time classical music in Chicago at the time, because a "Citizen's Committee to Save WFMT" had forced the Tribune Co. to sell that classical station to WTTW, the public TV station in town, after 'FMT's founder had sold it to the Tribune, the same people decided to fight WEFM's format switch with a "Citizen's Committee to Save WEFM." They got a court injunction in spring 1972 that stopped the format change the night before it was going to happen--with an air staff hired, billboards out on the street, ads in the weekend papers and the record library all packed to be shipped to WNIB, the *other* classical music station in town. Soon afterwards, the FCC then washed its hands of judgments on radio format changes. It still took General Cinema five years to flip the station, after making agreements to donate programming and materials to both WNIB and NPR station WBEZ. The flip to Top 40 finally occurred in early 1978. Like WDHF/WMET a few years earlier, the station got some teen audiences, but they were unable to take the mass audience away from WLS and the station flipped to the Schulke II MOR format at the end of 1980. In 1982, General Cinema sold WEFM to Greater Media, who flipped the format to country and the call letters to WUSN-"US99." It's still country and still US99 today, although Infinity has owned the station for the last decade. WBEZ dropped its few hours of classical music programming after the death in the early 80s of Dick Noble, the former WEFM morning drive man who switched to 'BEZ as part of the format change agreement (and was moved out of morning drive to 9 a.m.-to-noon when NPR's "Morning Edition" premiered in 1979). Noble's show was the main classical programming on the station, which was (and is) primarily talk and jazz. WNIB, the last ma-and-pa FM in Chicago, was sold to Bonneville in 2001 for a lot of money and is now the successful classic hits WDRV--"The Drive." WFMT, still owned by WTTW, is now Chicago's only commercial classical music station. |
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