The challenge to Fox's Philadelphia TV-station license is drawing a crowd, including founding president of Fox Broadcasting Jamie Kellner.
Already this week Alfred Sikes, the Republican FCC chairman whose commission helped pave the way for the creation of a fourth network, registered his support for holding a hearing on Fox's qualifications to be an FCC licensee. Now Kellner, along with former Democratic FCC Commissioner Ervin Duggan and ex-Fox News Channel commentator Bill Kristol, former editor of The Weekly Standard, have joined the chorus of Fox critics.
The three men were responding to Fox's defense of its qualification for holding broadcast licenses.
Kellner, in an informal objection filed with the FCC Tuesday (Aug. 22), urged the FCC to designate the license of WTXF Philadelphia for hearing, given cable network Fox News Channel’s “repeated telecast of adjudicated falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election with at least the concurrence of Fox and the [Rupert Murdoch family].”
“While I was President of FBC we started a news division that provided daily feeds of national and international news stories for the Fox-owned and affiliated television stations for inclusion in their locally produced newscasts,” Kellner told the FCC. “Unlike the news feeds provided today by Fox News Channel, our news feeds did not prominently feature advocates like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell spouting nonsensical lies about a presidential election.”
Given those lies, Kellner said, he agreed entirely with the petition to designate the station for hearing and said, “If the character requirement for broadcast licensees is to have any meaning, the FCC must designate the application for a hearing to evaluate the Murdochs’s/Fox’s character qualifications to operate WTXF on the public airwaves.”
Kristol and Duggan said that while they were not lawyers it didn't take one to see the “gaping holes” in Fox’s arguments, and that a hearing is required. “Every application for a broadcast license renewal is not only a test for the applicant, but also for the FCC itself,” they wrote in their informal objection. “In considering this application, the Commission inevitably will reveal whether it is serious about its regulations or merely pretending.”
The Media and Democracy Project, which petitioned for the Fox hearing, also filed its formal response to Fox Tuesday. It said none of Fox's reponses were, in fact, responsive to its allegations regarding Fox's false statements cited in the Dominion defamation case, which Fox settles, with Fox simply saying that its cable news programming is not relevant to its TV station license renewal application.
MAD said that its petition and Fox’s reply “firmly establish the need for swift and severe FCC action to disable Fox from similar pernicious misconduct in the future.”
The FCC is authorized to review a license applicant's “citizenship, character, technical, financial and other qualifications.”
Fox suggests that to deny the renewal would be a case of the government trying to tell it how to run its news operation. While Fox concedes that broadcast speech has lesser protection from regulation than other content, thanks to the Supreme Court decision in the Red Lion case, it says that in the context of license renewals, the FCC has signaled it will tread lightly.
