RBR-TVBR recently wrote about a consent decree between Townsquare Media and the FCC in which TM took responsibility for questionable advertisements on El Paso radio stations owned at the time by Regent. Here’s a closer look with the benefit of documents and audio provided by the original complainant in the case.
The primary station in question was Regent’s KLAQ-FM, although its other two El Paso stations, KROD-FM and KSII-AM, were also mentioned in the case. And the advertisements in question were from a business called Cigarette Outlet.
The problem, of course, is the blatant illegality of advertising cigarettes over the air.
The complainant, Robert King, ran a spirited and thorough campaign against the stations – he said he was monitoring them for other reasons when the tobacco advertisement caught his attention.
King provided RBR-TVBR with audio for two commercials – which mention tobacco, hookahs, smoking accessories, “pipe dreams,” lighters, and cigars.
[audio:KLAQ-audio1-082013.mp3|titles=Audio Clip 1] [audio:KLAQ-audio2-082013.mp3|titles=Audio Clip 2]The dodge that the stores and Regent used to justify running the ads was the deliberate avoidance of the word cigarette.
But leaving that word out meant leaving out the name of the sponsor, and that is a violation of FCC rules on sponsor identification.
In the view of RBR-TVBR, the situation is reminiscent of getting Al Capone on tax violations when more serious offenses could not be pinned on him.
It is King’s belief that hefty penalties should have been levied on Regent based on the amount of money he calculates the company made selling the ads. He suggested to the FCC at one point that a fine amounting to ten times gross profit should be assessed, did some math and came up with a figure just south of $90K.
King also believes that Townsquare has dirty hands – he says he warned the company what it was getting into when its plans to acquire the stations was made public, and suggested that the ads continued to run after Townsquare had apparently taken over station operations.
One thing seems clear – the FCC doesn’t seem to want anything further to do with the matter. The consent decree spells out that the investigation is terminated and all third-party complaints and allegations are terminated.
RBR-TVBR observation: We’re not lawyers, but here’s our take:
For starters, to ears that have not heard tobacco mentioned on the air in decades, other than in PSAs preaching avoidance, these ads are jarring.
That said, although we sympathize with King, he has no power to suggest fines; indeed, the FCC has only a certain amount of leeway in assessing fines.
We are not so certain that Townsquare has dirty hands. No legal action can be taken on the appearance that a company is in control; and even if these ads ran during a period when Townsquare was operating the stations in an LMA, ultimate responsibility for any programming aired would rest with the licensee. Townsquare’s responsibility begins the day it owns the license and not before.
As we mentioned before, on a certain level Townsquare should be commended for bringing solvent ownership to these stations.
On the language dodge used in the commercial scripts, we have no idea if tobacco products can be advertised as long as the word cigarette is avoided. We would have thought not. The consent decree with Townsquare focused on sponsorship ID. We will try to poke around a bit more in that area.
If we were going to go after Regent for running these commercials, we probably would have tried working with the Federal Trade Commission, which is more closely associated with policing content than is the FCC.
