Oct 19, 2023

Advocates ramp up pressure on FCC to revoke Fox TV license

Maria Curi

Oct 19, 2023

Media and Democracy Project petitioners, from left: David Goodfriend, counsel/advisor; Bill Kristol, formerly of The Weekly Standard; Art Belendiuk, counsel; Milo Vassallo, executive director; Preston Padden, former Fox executive; Bill Reyner, former Fox executive; and Al Sikes, former Republican FCC chair. Photo: Aaron Alberico

The FCC on Tuesday met with advocates trying to block Fox 29 News Philadelphia's broadcast license renewal.

Why it matters: Petitioners with the Media and Democracy Project say WTXF-TV, one of the Fox network's largest outlets, undermined democracy by spreading election disinformation.

The intrigue: People with past ties to Fox and conservative media are now petitioning with the Media and Democracy Project against the broadcast giant.

That includes former Fox lobbyist Preston Padden, former Fox outside legal counsel Bill Reyner and former Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol.

What's happening: A variety of senior FCC officials, including Media Bureau chief Holly Saurer and Video Division chief Barbara Kreisman, attended the meeting this week with petitioners, according to a summary of the meeting shared by MAD with Axios.

Petitioners called on the FCC to require Fox to make available troves of documents related to its business dealings and to schedule a formal hearing on its license renewal, according to the summary.
That includes all of the evidence in the high-profile Dominion and Smartmatic litigation and the documents related to political advertisers requesting to buy advertising on Fox 29 News Philadelphia.
Petitioners say reviewing the documents beforehand is necessary to make an informed decision about whether to have a hearing on the station's license renewal.

What they're saying: "Never in the history of the commission has the agency been confronted with a license renewal applicant whose parent company was found by a court of law to have repeatedly presented false news," Padden said in a statement to Axios.

"We were proud to bring a highly esteemed group before the Media Bureau to make our case and are confident we'll be hard for the Commission to ignore."

Fox Communications VP Erica Keane responded by pointing to a station FCC filing that states "MAD's efforts to subject Fox 29 Philadelphia's online public file to a level of scrutiny and document production known to no other broadcaster underscores MAD's real motivation: to misuse the broadcast license renewal process to punish a company which it dislikes for reasons unrelated to the company's FCC-regulated businesses."
The FCC did not respond to a request for comment.

Advocates ramp up pressure on FCC to revoke Fox TV license

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