AJIT’S ON THE HOT SEAT
FCC’s Pai probed over Sinclair-Tribune deal
The Federal Communications Commission’s controversial chairman is being probed.
The FCC’s internal watchdog has opened an investigating into whether Ajit Pai timed a rule change last April to benefit Sinclair Broadcasting, a New Jersey lawmaker confirmed on Thursday.
The rule change rejiggered the formula for determining how much of the country a company’s TV stations covered.
Long-standing rules held that one company’s collection of local stations couldn’t reach more than 39 percent of the country.
The FCC in the spring said it would no longer count UHF stations in the formula.
A week after the FCC made the change, Sinclair announced it was buying 42 Tribune Media stations for $3.9 billion.
Under the old formula, Sinclair, whose stations reached 38 percent of the country before the Tribune deal, would certainly have been blocked from making the acquisition.
With the UHF stations, a combined Sinclair-Tribune entity would reach 72 percent of the country.
The New Jersey lawmaker, Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone, wants to know if Pai’s meetings with Sinclair executives in the weeks before the rule change were proper.
Pallone said he has “serious concerns” over the rule change.
The probe will be led by FCC Inspector General Da- vid Hunt, whose office investigates potential violations of civil and criminal laws by agency staff members and companies that receive money from the agency.
Pallone and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) have been after Hunt to open an investigation since last fall.
The two want Hunt to look over all Pai’s communications, including e-mails, social media accounts, text messages and phone calls between him and Sinclair.
“For months I have been trying to get to the bottom of the allegations about Chairman Pai’s relationship with Sinclair Broadcasting,” Pallone, the top Democrat on the committee that oversees the FCC, said. “I am grateful to the FCC’s inspector general that he has decided to take up this important investigation.”
An investigation could take a year or more, sources said. Meanwhile, the Sinclair-Tribune deal remains on track in front of antitrust regulators — a review that shouldn’t be slowed by the Hunt probe.
Pai has maintained that the rule changes were under consideration before the Sinclair merger.
Neither Pai’s office nor Sinclair returned requests for comment.
The investigation could affect the terms of the Sinclair-Tribune deal, according to Andrew Schwartzman, a senior fellow at Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Public Representation. He told the New York Times, which first reported on the Hunt probe, that it “could cast a cloud over the whole [merger] process.”
“For the review, knowledge of an investigation could generate caution and even delay completion of the deal,” Schwartzman said.