FCC Upholds Fine Against Gray TV

The Federal Communications Commission said it will not rescind its half-million dollar fine against Gray Television for "willfully and repeatedly" violating its prohibition on owning two of the top-four rated full-power TV stations in a market. 

Gray said it will take the FCC to court and expects to get the decision reversed, according to nexttv.com.

The FCC proposed the fine in July 2021, a first for the acquisition of a network affiliation. Gray appealed but the agency on Tuesday (Nov. 1) rejected the appeal and said the fine stands.

The commission said that the proposed fine stemmed from its acquisition of the CBS affiliation of KTVA — which went dark — when it already owned NBC affiliate KTUU, both in Anchorage, Alaska. At the time the stations were ranked Nos. 1 and 2 in the market. Gray put the CBS programming on its KYES Anchorage, but then moved it to a co-owned low-power station and simulcast it on a digital subchannel of KTUU.

In 2016, the FCC clarified its rule on owning two of top four stations that it barred “the common ownership of two top-four stations with overlapping contours in the same DMA through the acquisition of a network affiliation.”

The FCC had concluded Gray’s acquisition of the CBS network affiliation of KTVA Anchorage “resulted in the ownership and operation of two of the top-four stations in the Anchorage DMA,” saying Tuesday that nothing Gray had said in its defense persuaded it otherwise.

In its appeal, Gray argued, among other things, that it did not have any notice that the affiliation purchase violated local-ownership rules and said that in any event, the FCC was impermissibly regulating its content choices.

The FCC was unmoved and also rejected Gray’s argument that the agency should not have applied a per-day forfeiture metric to come up with the $518,283 fine, which was based on $8,000 per day up to the statutory maximum.