Twenty-two months and four weeks ago, Cumulus Media received a hefty Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture from the FCC for not adhering to its Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) regulations at four FMs and an AM serving the Albany, Ga., market it used to own.
Now, the Commission has erased that big, proposed fine by issuing a Forfeiture Order to the Atlanta-headquartered audio content creation and distribution company. However, the financial penalty for Cumulus is only slightly lower in value.
The stations involved in Forfeiture Order are:
- Class D News/Talk WALG-AM 1590 in Albany and silent FM translator W257ED at 99.3 MHz in Albany. WALG-AM uses 1 tower.
- Class A WQVE-FM 101.7 in Albany
- Class C1 WKAK-FM 104.5 in Albany
- Class C3 WJAD-FM 103.5 in Leesburg, Ga.
- Class C3 WEGC-FM 107.7 in Sasser, Ga.
Albany, Ga., is one of two markets that were identified prior to Cumulus’ Chapter 11 restructuring as non-core to the company. On December 22, 2020, Cumulus completed the sale of the stations, with First Media Services paying $450,000 for the assets.
On February 25, 2022, Cumulus received a NALF in the amount of $32,000, after it was determined by the Commission that the company failed to do three key tasks:
- upload its annual EEO public file report in the stations’ online public inspection files
- upload its annual EEO public file report to the stations’ websites
- analyze its EEO program
The proposed fine resulted from Cumulus itself providing the Commission with the fact that it did not adhere to the company’s EEO rules, noting this in the station’s license renewal applications prior to the station sale’s closing date.
In particular, Cumulus admitted that the stations’ 2018 Annual Report had not been added to the stations’ public inspection files and websites until September 11, 2019. Why? A “routine administrative change” and the loss of a former employee.
The FCC, which isn’t out of the ordinary for the agency, had zero empathy. In its NALF from February 2022, it said, “correcting the oversight nine months after the fact, and only three months before the next Annual Report was due to be placed in the public inspection file, does not mitigate the violation.”
That did not stop Cumulus from responding to the NALF not with a check made payable to the FCC but with its urging of the Commission to “correct the record” and reconsider the $32,000 fine.
That it did, but instead the Commission is handing Cumulus a $26,000 fine — one that is payable within 30 days of January 16, 2024.
The key difference: the FCC rescinded the forfeiture amount of $6,000 for Cumulus’s violation of section 73.2080(c)(3) of the Commission’s rules — failing to analyze an EEO program. However, it affirmed the company’s violation of sections 73.2080(c)(6) and 73.3526(e)(7).
Interestingly, the NAB filed comments in support of Cumulus; the FCC dismissed and denied them.
With the forfeiture order, the Commission also affirmed its belief that the agency property considered the violations prior to its reorganization when increasing the forfeiture amount; Cumulus asserted that its bankruptcy in 2018 and “fresh start” through its emergence opened up a door to absolving licensee rule violations resulting in fine at the Commission.
“Cumulus’s implication that it is a drastically different organization post-transfer is belied by the fact that its core senior management team remained unchanged by the 2018 transfer of control,” the Commission declared. “Cumulus Media President/Chief Executive Officer Mary Berner continued to serve in the same capacity.”
This erased Cumulus’ claims the upward adjustment from $10,000 to $26,0000 based on past EEO violations in 2008 and 2017, and a variety of unrelated past violations dating back to 2003, is unjust as the upward adjustment amounts to a punishment for the past misdeeds of others given that Cumulus’s ownership structure changed “substantially” since 2003.
