A noncommercial Class A television station airing religious programming has agreed to a consent decree with the FCC’s Media Bureau that officially absolves the station’s owner of the sin of having missing or untimely filed documents in its online local public inspection file.
The consent decree allows the FCC to move ahead with the TV station’s license renewal — provided that the station owner makes a settlement payment of $2,000 to the U.S. Treasury within 30 calendar days of Oct. 21, the date the consent decree was issued.
RBR + TVBR OBSERVATION (Appears In Full Below, for subscribers) : This settlement payment could have easily been avoided. As many of our Media Information Bureau columns from featured columnist Ken Benner have noted, the FCC isn’t up to a “slap on the wrist” for something so seemingly minor as an incomplete public file.
