The Federal Communications Commission has upheld imposing the maximum per-violation fine of $512,228 on 17 of 18 Sinclair Broadcast TV stations identified as having violated the FCC’s good-faith requirement in retransmission consent negotiations, reports Mediapost.
The fines are based on an FCC’s Forfeiture Order from September 2020 — the first ever issued for failure to negotiate retrans agreements in good faith.
The penalties resulted from a June 2019 complaint by AT&T and its DirecTV DBS service, charging that the Sinclair stations had intentionally and unreasonably delayed retrans negotiations, in part by failing to respond to AT&T’s proposals.
In its complaint, AT&T said that all of the stations involved were "managed and controlled by Sinclair Broadcast Group through some type of shared services agreement."
In September 2020, it rejected an appeal by the eight station groups involved: Deerfield Media, GoCom Media, Howard Stirk Holdings, HSH, Mercury Broadcasting, MPS Media, KMTR Television, Second Generation of Iowa and Waitt Broadcasting.
The FCC also rejected a subsequent response from the stations arguing that they should be fined no more than $25,000 per station.
However, the agency did reduce the forfeiture penalty for one station, Mercury, to $30,000, citing the station’s “demonstrable inability to pay” the maximum fine.
The 18 stations’ fines total more $8.74 million.
This is not Sinclair’s first run-in with the FCC — or its first scrutiny for negotiations behavior.
In May 2020, Sinclair agreed to pay a record $48 million civil penalty and abide by a “strict compliance plan” to close three open FCC investigations.
The penalty was the largest ever imposed on a broadcaster in the agency’s 86-year history, and twice the previous record fine for a broadcaster — $24 million paid by Univision in 2007 — according to the FCC.
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