The FCC granted a request to transfer control of three television licenses owned by Jack Sander to subsidiaries of Tegna.
The stations are: WHAS-TV, Louisville, Ky., KGW, Portland Ore. and KMSB, Tucson, Ariz.
In 2013, the Media Bureau approved the station acquisition by the former Gannett company now called Tegna from Belo. Back then, the local TV ownership rule and/or newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rule banned Gannett from acquiring Belo licenses in 5 markets where Gannett also owned daily newspapers.
The commission’s approval of the Gannett/Belo deal approved assigning some Belo TV licenses to subsidiaries of Sander Media and Tucker Operating Co.
This June, Tegna spun off the publishing assets so its shareholders now own shares in two separate companies. As a result, Tegna no longer has attributable interests in the publishing assets in any of the overlap markets at issue previously.
Now, Tegna wanted to acquire Sander stations in the three markets and none from Tucker. Before the Gannett/Belo acquisition, Belo owned KMSB and KTTU as a duopoly. KMSB now sells the ad time of KTTU as part of a joint sales agreement.
This JSA is now attributable to Tegna for the purposes of applying the media ownership limits and will be over the cap. That’s why, in connection with the sale, Tegna sought a waiver of the local television ownership cap to give it enough time for a transition and to end the JSA.
The Video Division granted a nine-month waiver.
