Feld: Campaign Against Fox Station 'Longshot' but Not 'Frivolous'

An effort to push the FCC to designate Fox-owned WTXF-TV Philadelphia's license for hearing is "a longshot" but isn’t “frivolous,” wrote Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld in a blog post Tuesday. The allegations from the Media and Democracy Project “raise real, if novel questions” on the boundaries of the FCC’s character policies and how the conduct of one part of a company reflects on another subsidiary’s fitness to hold a broadcast license, Feld wrote. The agency will eventually “have to actually write up a real and binding decision with real consequences and real precedential value,” Feld wrote. In an interview, he conceded the FCC could take a long time to do so and could even potentially let the matter sit until a new administration takes over. A previous dispute involving the license of Fox-owned station WWOR-TV Secaucus, New Jersey, caused the FCC to take seven years, from 2007 to 2014, to approve renewal.