Sinclair To Sign-Off TV Stations

Broadcasting giant Sinclair is taking some of its local stations in Alabama and South Carolina off the air after this year’s Federal Communications Commission actions to keep broadcasters from sharing resources.

The Hill reports in a filing with the FCC on Thursday, Sinclair told the agency that it couldn’t find buyers for two stations in Birmingham, Ala., and one station in Charleston, N.C., after the FCC’s actions to curb resource sharing among broadcasters.

Sinclair was supposed to sell those local broadcast stations as part of its nearly $1-billion deal to purchase stations from competitor Allbritton Communications.

Earlier this year, the FCC voted 3-2 to crack down on broadcast stations that share advertising sales resources.

Under FCC rules, a company can only own one of the top four broadcast stations in any market.

The FCC voted in March to consider any two stations that share more than 15 percent of their advertising sales resources as being owned by the same company.

The agency also said it would begin to look at deals between broadcasters to share other types of resources.

Critics of the broadcast industry hailed the move as a crackdown on collusion that operated outside the lines of federal regulation.

But broadcasters protested the vote, saying that the resource sharing arrangements helped small broadcasters remain competitive and pointing to the FCC’s allowance of these deals in the past.

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