Philly TV: Former FCC Chair Joins Call For WTXF License Hearing

Former Republican FCC Chairman and broadcast licensee Alfred Sikes have joined the Media and Democracy Project (MAD) and media veterans Ervin S. Duggan and William Kristol to support a petition to deny the broadcast license renewal application for Fox Corp.-owned WTXF Philadelphia, reports TV Newscheck.

Sikes said: “The FCC has allowed the public interest responsibility of broadcast licensees to become a bureaucratic construct. The behavior of Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, highlighted in the MAD petition, raises a first principles question. Is truthful conduct a part of the standard?”

Nominated by President George H.W. Bush, Sikes was FCC chairman from 1989 to 1992. Prior to that, he was nominated by President Reagan to become assistant secretary of Commerce and director of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

As FCC Chair, Sikes supported providing Rupert Murdoch with critical FCC waivers needed to launch Fox Broadcasting Co. Throughout his tenure at the FCC, Sikes opposed the advocacy of Murdoch’s competitors seeking to block efforts to create America’s fourth broadcast network.

“It is noteworthy that Fox News declared Biden the winner in 2020; it was after all paying expert analysts to parse data to help it project winners and losers,” Sikes says in the objection. “And then much of its primetime news coverage and opinionators fell in behind the Donald Trump version, not the Fox version of the outcome. They choose fiction over nonfiction to make many of its listeners and viewers happy. They knew the facts and decided to ignore them.”

The objection concludes by saying: “The FCC has allowed the pledge to operate in the public interest to become perfunctory at best. If the public interest means anything, the FCC must designate for a hearing the application of the Murdochs and Fox for renewal of their license to operate station WTXF, Philadelphia.”

On July 3, MAD filed a petition to deny the broadcast license renewal application for WTXF. MAD is calling on the FCC to initiate an evidentiary hearing into Fox’s conduct to examine whether Fox and its leadership have violated the character requirements expected from public trustees granted a broadcast license.