Broadcasters need to “take care” to avoid ending up with “poor relations” with FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, said Expanding Opportunities for Broadcasting Coalition Executive Director Preston Padden in a statement on the EOBC website Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1gRKNZR). Padden said broadcaster reactions to two recent events are “warning signs” that broadcasters’ relationship with Wheeler may be headed south. After the FCC’s announcement of expanded outreach to broadcasters on the incentive auction (CD Jan 31 p7) and after news broke that Wheeler’s office is working on a plan to tighten rules governing broadcaster sharing agreements (CD Feb 3 p11), some broadcast industry sources described both events as possible attempts to force participation in the incentive auction. “The trade press was filled with accusations and innuendo from broadcast industry sources,” said Padden, calling the idea “a suggestion as ridiculous as it was unhelpful.” The broadcast response to expanded outreach on the incentive auction “should have been ‘Thank You,'” said Padden. The idea that plans to tighten joint sales agreement rules are rooted in forcing participation in the auction is “provably false,” Padden said. Shared service agreements “and JSAs are prevalent in small- and mid-sized markets -- markets where the FCC almost certainly will NOT be buying spectrum in the auction.” Broadcasters don’t help their cause by “whispering provably false accusations of bad motives on the part of the new FCC Chair,” Padden said. “Let’s try to make this Chairman our friend."

The FCC should tighten its process for accepting indecency complaints, make it more transparent and pursue only complaints that can be shown to originate with “bona fide” viewers, said Fox in an ex parte filing Friday (http://bit.ly/1oNJtLP). The network recently received numerous complaint letters at many of its owned stations about an episode of Family Guy that it says were generated by a “complaint mill” rather than by actual viewers. Though the letters in question appeared to come from viewers at 16 different addresses, they were all mailed from the same Miami post office, and many of the apparent return addresses don’t exist, Fox said. “Advocates have begun to undertake elaborate ruses that manipulate the FCC’s processes and deceive the Commission into believing that numerous complaints have been filed from numerous communities even if in reality they originate from a single source at a single location,” Fox said. The “scheme” undermines the credibility of the complaint process, Fox said, and “leaves the Commission constitutionally unable to fulfill its promise to maintain a restrained enforcement policy.” Because the allegedly fake filings throw doubt on the others, the FCC should dismiss any pending complaints against Fox based on the episode of Family Guy, Fox said. Fox’s filing is “a calculated effort to re-litigate the U.S. Supreme Court cases that they lost and to circumvent the law rather than obey it,” said Parents Television Council Director of Communications and Policy Dan Isset. The episode of Family Guy contained “explicit jokes about rape, molestation and sexual exploitation of children,” said PTC. Though Isset said defective complaints should be dismissed by the FCC, he said Fox hadn’t shown that all complaints were defective. “In no case does Fox assert that all of the several hundred thousand pending indecency complaints are in any way defective, yet bizarrely suggests the FCC should ignore all of them without review,” said Isset.

CEA is committed to “working with the Commission to ensure a successful incentive auction,” the trade association told officials from the FCC’s Incentive Auction Task Force, Office of Engineering and Technology and Wireless Bureau in a meeting last week, according to an ex parte letter released Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1geUNKV). CEA also “expressed support” for the pilot channel-sharing program being conducted in Los Angeles, the filing said.

Cox Radio agreed to buy the construction permits for FM translator stations W246CY Bradenton, Fla., and W273CP New Port Richey, Fla., from Circuitwerkes, said a news release from broker Media Services Group. The purchase price of the permits is $187,950.

The Association of Public Television Stations urged the FCC Media Bureau to rescind the proposed $20,000 fine on Maryland Public Television. The bureau alleged that MPT failed to comply with elements of the FCC’s equal employment opportunity (EEO) rules and it provided incorrect factual information to the FCC on MPT’s EEO program, APTS said in a filing (http://bit.ly/1ghvk5U). MPT has shown “that it takes its EEO obligations very seriously, and that it has for decades implemented an effective EEO program that includes a diverse complement of recruiting sources and outreach efforts,” APTS said.

Broadcasters must take care to get the right permissions before obtaining content from the Internet and using it on their own websites, a broadcast attorney said. “Just by posting a picture, video or other content on the Internet does not mean that it is free for anyone to appropriate and use,” said David Oxenford of Wilkinson Barker. “In recent months, we have seen many lawsuits filed against broadcasters, including against some of the biggest broadcasters in the country, over improper use of photographs found on the Internet,” he said in a blog post (http://bit.ly/1c6S8no). While it’s true that some websites allow materials to be shared by the site or within it, “exploiting that material outside of the confines allowed by the site on which the material is posted, or in circumstances not contemplated by the terms of use of the site on which the material is used, can lead to issues,” he said. This is especially true when the content is reused in a commercial setting, “like the website of a business like that run by a radio or TV station,” he said. Linking to the content needs to be done carefully, he said. “If you remove the need to go to the site to which you are linking, you are asking for trouble.”

Applicants for AM broadcast construction permits in Auction 84 can review, verify or update their short-form applications from Feb. 19 to March 4, the FCC said in a Federal Register notice. The closed auction will take place May 6 (CD Jan 29 p14).

CBS, Time Warner, Viacom and other media companies urged the FCC to reject a proposal from Comcast that involves a “burden-shifting” enforcement model for compliance with the TV closed captioning rules. Comcast hasn’t adequately explained “why the commission should depart from its longstanding policy of enforcing the television closed captioning rules” against multichannel video programming distributors, the companies said in a filing in docket 05-231 (http://bit.ly/1hgMeEH). To the extent that a video programming provider’s failure to provide compliant captions in its programming is the basis for a consumer complaint, the VPP “is contractually liable to the MVPD by virtue of closed captioning obligations that are imposed on the VPP pursuant to the carriage agreement between the MVPD and VPP,” the filing said. It would be “arbitrary” and “capricious” for the FCC to reverse course “and suddenly directly subject program suppliers to television closed caption obligations, especially where the facts and circumstances underlying a policy have not changed, without a showing based on good reasons,” it said.

It’s clear that the FCC is cracking down on violations of all of its rules on programming matters, a broadcast attorney said. Recent cases on sponsorship violation enforcement include the $44,000 fine issued to Cumulus Media (CD Feb 13 p7). “These cases make it clear that, if a programming rule is violated, you can expect little mercy from the FCC,” said David Oxenford of Wilkinson Barker. Regarding the forfeiture order against Cumulus, the commission rejected any reduction in the proposed fine based on the fact that it was an inadvertent employee error, he said in a blog post (http://bit.ly/1or1ob6). The FCC faulted the licensee “for not turning itself in to the FCC, and found that the corrective actions did not mitigate the fact that the violations occurred, and thus gave no reason to reduce the amount of the fine,” he said. “So be very careful to observe all the FCC’s programming rules."

The FCC Media Bureau said Thunder Bay Broadcasting and Lake Superior Community Broadcasting are apparently liable for failing to timely file children’s TV reports for their stations. Thunder Bay is apparently liable for a $20,000 fine for its station WBKB-TV, Alpena, Mich., the bureau said in a notice of apparent liability (http://bit.ly/1fhjzs1). Thunder Bay failed to file its reports in a timely manner for multiple quarters, it said. Lake Superior is apparently liable for a $6,000 fine for the reports of WBKP-TV, Calumet, Mich., and WBUP-TV, Ishpeming, Mich., the bureau said (http://bit.ly/1eQHAew).