Soo Kim, managing partner of Standard General, took to the online op-ed pages of Newsweek to accuse the Federal Communications Commission of an “unaccountable power grab.”
Kim was referring to the decision by the FCC’s Media Bureau to designate Standard General’s $8.6 billion deal to purchase Tegna TV stations and other assets to an FCC administrative law judge, a move that traditionally has resulted in such deals being abandoned.
Standard General has appealed that decision.
The FCC has yet to vote up or down on the merger proposal, so there is no final decision that could be appealed to the courts, leaving Standard General to essentially twist in the wind as it approaches a May deadline for getting the deal done after it spent most of a year trying.
Kim said that the decision to refer the deal to the ALJ was not a procedural step, but instead a “carefully aimed kill-shot designed to evade a formal vote by the commissioners, as well as potential oversight by Congress or the courts.”
Standard General has been trying to acquire Tegna’s 64 TV stations and other assets for most of a year, but the Media Bureau said that for the FCC to vet the deal according to the public interest, the ALJ needs to weigh in on “material concerns in the record related to how the proposed transaction could artificially raise prices for consumers and result in job losses.”
While the Justice Department or Federal Trade Commission vet deals for antitrust issues, the FCC gets to look beyond that to a deal’s impact on the public interest, a broad standard that is open to interpretation — and abuse, Kim suggests.
“They claim the ALJ needs to review additional evidence related to potential impacts on jobs and consumer prices,” he wrote. “Yet the parties have already turned over millions of pages of evidence, sat through hours of depositions, responded to all comments and inquiries of fact and law and offered concrete commitments to address these very issues. Not to mention the fact that jobs and pricing are not technically issues that fall under the Media Bureau's jurisdiction (and the DOJ, which does have authority to act allowed the review period to expire without challenge).”
FCC critics have argued the regulator is doing an end run on due process by failing to come to an appealable vote by the full commission. Kim definitely is in that camp. “By arbitrarily defining ‘public interest,’ the Media Bureau — an office within the FCC bureaucracy — has effectively made itself judge and jury,” Kim said. “This issue merits broader public attention and scrutiny. Because if this outcome stands, it is impossible to know where it ends.” ■
