Standard General, Tegna and Cox Media Group on Friday formally filed an application asking the Federal Communications Commission to review its Media Bureau’s decision to have a administrative law judge hold a hearing on Standard General’s pending acquisition of Tegna.

Standard General agreed to acquire Tegna more than a year ago and the transaction has been stuck in regulatory review ever since. Standard General and Tegna argue that further delay will unlawfully kill the deal, as its financing runs out on May 22.

“Today, we filed a formal Application for Review with the FCC regarding the Media Bureau’s hearing designation order, which threatens to torpedo our effort to build a company that will expand investment in local news, protect local news jobs and create the nation’s largest ever minority-owned, female-led broadcast television company,” Standard General said in a statement. 

Also Read: Tegna Stock Plunges After FCC Sends Standard General Deal to Judge

“As we have made clear previously, our applications comply with all FCC rules and deserve a vote by the FCC commissioners, which any three commissioners can request,“ Standard General said. “Instead, the Media Bureau’s order is endangering those public-interest benefits through a transparent effort to exercise an unlawful, unprecedented and indefensible pocket veto.” 

In their petition, Standard General and Tegna have argued the transaction will created a minority-owned company and expand local reporting and programming.

The Media Bureau action “is not only unnecessary and unfair — it is unlawful,“ the petition reads. “The Communications Act, the Commission’s rules, and an unbroken chain of precedent require grant of the applications. The Commission has a clear obligation to intervene to prevent the Media Bureau’s disparate treatment of the applications from depriving the public of substantial benefits of the transactions while damaging both Tegna and the entire broadcast industry’s future access to investment capital and financing, all to the great harm of the public.”

Standard and General also argued that contract to the Media Bureau’s finding that there were substantial and material question of fact, “challengers failed to present any competent evidence creating a substantial and material question on any relevant fact at issue.”

The petition also asserts the Media Bureau cannot use the potential for increased retransmission consent fees or the loss of journalists’ jobs as criteria to deny approval. 

Standard General has pledged not to increase retrans fees or cut newsroom jobs as part of the review process.

According to the petition, it is also unconstitutional to send the deal to an administrative law judge who cannot be removed by the president.

 “Time is of the essence,” the petition said. “As set forth in documents applicants filed with the Media Bureau, the ‘Final Extension Date’ of the Standard General-Tegna merger agreement is May 22, 2023. That deadline will pass long before a full evidentiary hearing could be completed, and applicants have no ability to extend that deadline. 

“If the Commission fails to grant the Applications before that date, the financing obligations of more than a dozen lenders helping to fund the transactions will expire as well,” Standard General continued. “The hearing designation order in effect denies the applications without basis and without due process. The Commission should swiftly correct that overreach. If the Commission has not done so by 5:00 p.m. on March 27, applicants will have no choice but to seek judicial relief.” ■

The FCC's Media Bureau again has reached out to the NewsGuild-CWA and The National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians (also CWA) to talk about the latter's problems with the Tegna-Standard General merger.

That is according to an ex parte accounting of an August 8 phone call between the guild's counsel, Andrew Schwartzman and Media Burea Deputy Chief Sarah Whitesell.

Asked if the Media Bureau had initiated the meeting as Schwartzman confirmed it had on a similar meeting last week, Schwartzman confirmed that was the case this time, too.

Schwartzman said he discussed the local job market as not just a competition issue but a localism and diversity issue when it comes to the public interest standard the FCC uses to judge mergers.

Also: Groups Say Tegna Deal Will 'Jack Up' Cable Prices

He also reiterated the various reasons the unions had standing to challenge the merger.

Elsewhere, Tegna and Standard General were pointing Monday (August 8) to the various diversity groups that were either supportive or cautiously optimistic about the merger, including the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters (NABOB) and the National Association of Hispanic Publications (NAHP).

"NAHP believes that the transaction falls in line with our organization’s mission: to better serve and empower Hispanic communities through demonstrated commitment to diversity and inclusion," the group said. ■

The FCC's Media Bureau is seeking comment on a request that it create a report on content vendor diversity.

Fuse Media led a coalition of minority-owned media groups that sought the new report, which would include requiring such data from any company that relies on an FCC license, or any subsidiary of that company. That would include any number of streaming services as well as traditional content producers and platforms -- Disney, Comcast, Paramount, among them.

The FCC, whose chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has put a premium on furthering equity and diversity in communications, put the Fuse petition for rulemaking out for comment Tuesday (May 24).

The quick turnaround -- the petition was filed less than three weeks ago -- suggests the issue could get traction, particularly with the panel Democrats.

Among the issues the FCC wants comment on are 1) how the FCC should define "minority," 2) how it should measure diversity (i.e. board membership, senior leadership, full-time employees), and 3) what authority the FCC has to collect the information.

The FCC is giving commenters until July 22 to weigh in, with reply comments due August 22.

Back in November, Rosenworcel pledged to Congress that the FCC would take a fresh look at the video programming marketplace, particularly as it concerned independent programmers. ■

Federal Communications Commission chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has installed some new bureau chiefs as she puts her stamp on the agency, but she signaled the now-former chiefs are sticking around, at least for now.

Rosenworcel was named chairwoman late last year after being acting chair for most of last year.

Alejandro Roark, who had been executive director of HTTP, a CEO roundtable of Latino groups promoting tech and telecom for Latino communities, has been named chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, replacing Patrick Webre.

Debra Jordan, who had been deputy chief of the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, will be chief of the bureau, succeeding Lisa Fowlkes. Her resume also includes managing critical information systems for the Department of Defense.

Holly Saurer, who has been a legal adviser to Rosenworcel, will head the Media Bureau, succeeding Michelle Carey. It will be a bureau homecoming since Sauer has been deputy chief and associate chief of the Media Bureau. Before that, she was an acting media adviser to Rosenworcel and former acting chairwoman Mignon Clyburn, as well as a legal adviser to former chair Tom Wheeler.

Loyaan Egal, who has been deputy chief of the Foreign Investment Review Section at the Department of Justice and chairman of so-called “team telecom,” will serve as acting chief of the Enforcement Bureau. Rosemary Harold had been chief. It will be a homecoming for Egal, who formerly led the FCC Enforcement Bureau's Universal Service Fund Strike Force.

Rosenworcel also named Michele Ellison, currently acting general counsel, to permanent (in the sense of non-acting) general counsel.

“I’d like to thank Michelle Carey, Lisa Fowlkes, Rosemary Harold and Patrick Webre for their public service as they transition to new roles across the agency,” Rosenworcel said.

Michelle Carey has been tapped to head the FCC's Media Bureau.

Carey had been named acting chief by new chair Ajit Pai, who has now removed the "acting" from her title.

"As acting chief, Michelle has already started the agency’s review of its media regulations, advanced the next-generation transmission standard for TV broadcasters, worked to revitalize AM Radio services, and eased burdens on noncommercial broadcasters," Pai said. "I am very pleased she has agreed to continue this work as bureau chief.”

Carey succeeds Bill Lake, who exited with the Obama Administration.

Before being named acting chief on Lake's departure, Carey had been deputy chief of the bureau. She is also former senior advisor at the National Telecommunications & Information Administration, which oversees government spectrum users much as the FCC does private users.

She was also senior advisor to the last Republican FCC chair, Kevin Martin.

WASHINGTON — The American Cable Association and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association are looking to save some trees — and themselves some green in the process.

In a request for declaratory ruling from the Media Bureau last week, the associations asked the FCC to declare that emails to subscribers for whom operators have a working email address can replace the “hundreds of millions of pages of paper” it requires annually to fulfill the FCC requirement for routine customer notifications oth at the time of a service’s purchase and at any other time upon request.

Those would include individual notices of how much a customer pays in rental fees for leased set-tops, prices and programming tier options, installation and maintenance policies, and more.

Most operators still provide a snail mail hard copy of information that MVPDs say “few subscribers read and virtually none retain.”

Making the requirement electronic, the organizations said, would help the environment, while modernizing the rules and speeding notices and updates. They also argued it would allow their members “greater flexibility to match the electronic operations of their online and other competitors.”

As precedent for the move away from paper, they pointed to the FCC’s decision to require TV stations and MVPD public files to be made available online in an FCC database rather than mandating them to keep hard copies at their main studios.

The Sierra Club has estimated that one tree translates to 10,000-20,000 pages, so let’s just say that if the trees could talk, after advising Clint Eastwood to take singing lessons, thousands of them would be saying thank you to the FCC and cable operators.

Click here to uncover the Clint Eastwood movie reference.