A broadcast television station serving the Alamo City that was an affiliate of The CW Network until the start of the 2010 season and since then has been the MyNetwork TV affiliate for the market is facing a hefty fine for failing to participate in three nationwide tests of the Emergency Alert System.
KCWX-2, licensed to Fredericksburg, Tex., and owned by Corridor Television, on January 8 was issued a Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture with a penalty totaling $369,190 — a steep price it could pay for sitting out of a trio of national EAS tests.
According to the FCC, KCWX did not participate in 2018, 2019 or 2021. Additionally, KCWX apparently failed to file the 2018 EAS Test Reporting System (ETRS) Form Three, as Corridor was found to have submitted “incorrect or misleading information, without a reasonable basis for believing such information to be correct and not misleading in five ETRS filings subsequent to each Nationwide Test of the EAS in 2018, 2019 and 2021,” the FCC said.
The Commission acted after it received a complaint on August 17, 2021, about KCWX, alleging its misrepresentation in handling and deployment of the EAS tests.
Specifically, with respect to section 11.61(a)(3)(i), the complaint alleges that for each Nationwide Test of the EAS that occurred on October 3, 2018; August 7, 2019; and August 11, 2021, the station did not conduct a “live” reception of the test using the correct FEMA-generated EAN and SAME header codes, but instead, used substitute, mismatched or incorrect SAME headers.
Corridor is wholly owned by Global Information Technologies Inc., a privately held company based in Texas, which is wholly owned by Saleem Tawil and Carmen Tawil. On September 14, 2022, the FCC Enforcement Bureau issued a Letter of Inquiry to Tawil-owned Corridor, which it responded to one month later.
In the response, Corridor admitted that it did not transmit the correct SAME Headers, test script audio, activation codes, and crawls in the 2018 and 2019 Nationwide Tests of the EAS, and did not use the correct SAME Header in the 2021 Nationwide Test of the EAS, as required by section 11.61(a)(3)(i), because “its staff did not know how to.”
Instead, KCWX substituted and transmitted prior years’ EAS Tones that it had gathered from the internet.
How did the FCC respond? “It is long held Commission precedent that a licensee is responsible for the actions of its employees, and that a licensee is not excused for violation due to staff error or deception,” it said. “We do not find that wishful thinking on the part of Corridor’s staff constitutes a ‘good faith’ effort to comply with our EAS rules. Corridor’s noncompliance over multiple years based on its staff’s claimed ignorance of the law shows minimal effort on the station’s part and hardly constitutes a ‘good faith effort’ to comply with its EAS obligations.”
To read the forfeiture order in full, please click here:
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-24-133A1.pdf
