Media Bureau Rules Against Ohio Write-in Candidate

Several iHeartMedia-owned stations didn’t violate FCC rules by ceasing carriage of ads in 2020 from a write-in political candidate who the stations said was taking advantage of the rules to get stations to air his content, said the Media Bureau in an order in Monday’s Daily Digest. Jim Condit, who was running for the House in Ohio’s 2nd congressional district “failed to make a substantial showing of his bona fide candidacy, and therefore was not a legally qualified write-in candidate under the Commission’s rules,” the order said. WKRC(AM) Cincinnati and WLW(AM) Cincinnati initially accepted Condit’s ads and ran them for three weeks before suspending the broadcasts and asking Condit for additional evidence of his qualifications. Condit told the FCC the suspension was censorship and based on the content of his ads. The order doesn’t contain descriptions of the content of the 2020 ads, but in 2018 Condit made headlines for running campaign ads that described the owners of media organizations as “billionaire communist jews.” Condit’s showing that he was a real write-in candidate included campaign pamphlets from previous election years and no campaign events held in the district in which he was running, the Media Bureau said. “We do not find that the activities in which Mr. Condit claims to have engaged within the 2nd Congressional District -- handing out business cards at undisclosed locations on unspecified dates as Mr. Condit went about his daily life -- constitute efforts that would reasonably support a substantial showing of bona fide candidacy,” the order said. There's no evidence the suspension of the ads was related to content, the order said. Condit didn’t comment.