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 STATEMENT  OF  COMMISSIONER  MICHAEL  J.  COPPS 
 Re:  Applications  for  the  Assignment  of  Chris  Craft  Television  Licenses  to  Fox  Television  Stations,  Inc. 
 I  must  respectfully  dissent  from  the  approval  of  this  license  transfer.  This 
 transaction  presents  a  number  of  unique  and  troubling  questions.  In  the  final  analysis,  I 
 cannot  support  the  grant  of  an  application  that  stretches  the  statutes,  denies  operative 
 Commission  rules  and  omits  critically  important  consideration  of  the  public  interest. 


 As  I  review  this  and  future  transactions,  I  bear  in  mind  my  responsibility  to 
 faithfully  implement  Congressional  mandates.  The  principal  statutory  inquiry  that  we 
 must  undertake  in  any  license  transfer  is  whether  the  “public  interest,  convenience,  and 
 necessity  will  be  served  by  the  granting  of  such  application.” 


 In  this  case,  the  Applicants  claim  that,  so  long  as  the  transfer  complies  with  the 
 Communications  Act  and  the  Commission’s  rules,  “there  is  no  requirement  that 
 applicants  make  a  public  interest  showing.”  We  need  not  even  reach  that  question  here, 
 because  these  license  transfer  applications  require  waivers  of  operative  rules.  I  recognize 
 that,  in  some  instances,  short-  term  waivers  may  be  necessary  to  effectuate  a  license 
 transfer  that  is  otherwise  in  the  public  interest.  But  in  approving  this  transfer,  the 
 Commission  is  granting  waivers  of  three  different  ownership  rules.  Certain  of  these  are 
 long-  term  waivers  that  appear  to  be  based  on  the  anticipation  that  prior  to  the  termination 
 of  the  waivers,  the  rules  may  be  relaxed  such  that  compliance  need  never  occur.  Sound 
 decisions  should  not  be  premised  upon  subjective  conjecture  about  how  future  actions  by 
 the  courts,  Congress  or  the  Commission  may  change  the  law  or  alter  the  rules  under 
 which  we  are  instructed  to  operate. 


 I  am  further  troubled  by  today’s  decision  permitting  foreign  ownership  in 
 circumstances  generally  proscribed  by  the  Act.  The  Act  expressly  provides  that  an 
 additional  public  interest  finding  is  required  for  a  transfer  to  a  corporation  “that  is  directly 
 or  indirectly  controlled  by  any  other  corporation  of  which  more  than  one-  fourth  of  the 
 capital  stock  is  owned  of  record  or  voted  by  aliens.”  In  its  1995  decision  regarding  the 
 acquiring  company,  the  Commission  stated  that  “Section  310(  b)  was  intended  to 
 safeguard  domestic  station  licenses  from  undue  foreign  influence  and  control.”  The 
 Commission  found  that  this  Congressional  intent,  and  the  national  security  interests  that 
 underlie  it,  have  “effectively  created  a  presumption  in  the  broadcast  area  that,  absent 
 special  considerations  that  outweigh  the  statutory  concerns,  the  public  interest  will  be 
 served  by  denying  licenses  to  entities  with  alien  ownership  above  25  percent.” 


 In  the  same  1995  decision,  however,  the  Commission  approved  a  transaction  and 
 found  that  for  the  purposes  of  the  foreign  ownership  rules,  Fox  may  continue  to  acquire 
 television  stations  “consistent  with  the  public  interest”  subject  to  the  same  ownership 
 structure.  Rather  than  explain  how  the  instant  transaction  would  serve  the  public  interest, 
 or  even  how  the  denial  of  the  grant  of  these  applications  would  not  serve  the  public 
 interest,  Applicants  rely  entirely  on  the  going  forward  approval  of  the  ownership 
 structure  in  the  1995  Commission  decision.  Had  I  been  on  the  Commission  at  the  time  of 
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 that  decision,  I  would  not  have  accepted  such  an  open-  ended  provision.  Accepting  the 
 precedent  in  this  instance,  it  nevertheless  does  not  appear  to  me  that  this  transaction  is 
 consistent  with  the  ownership  structure  that  the  Commission  approved  in  1995  and 
 ratified  by  a  short  form  assignment  and  minimal  restructuring  in  1998.  Although  the 
 Applicants  have  gone  to  great  lengths  to  design  agreements  so  that  another  company 
 technically  holds  the  station  licenses  transferred  here,  that  company  will  not  by  any 
 indicia  own  these  stations.  Indeed,  the  ownership  and  control  schemata  underlying  this 
 Applicant  grow  murkier  and  more  Byzantine  with  each  new  iteration. 


 More  fundamentally,  today’s  decision,  taken  en  toto,  does  not  even  consider  the 
 public  interest  benefits  that  could  counterbalance  the  failure  to  comply  with  Commission 
 rules  and  the  granting  of  waivers.  Some  of  the  waivers  at  issue  here  are  close  calls,  and, 
 were  they  backed  by  a  showing  of  the  public  interest,  I  might  be  able  to  support  their 
 grant.  The  record  of  this  proceeding,  however,  is  deafeningly  silent  when  it  comes  to 
 laying  out  the  benefits  to  the  American  people  of  this  proposed  transaction. 


 I  hope  that  in  the  future,  parties  making  application  to  the  Commission  will  take 
 seriously  the  provisions  of  the  Communications  Act  that  require  us  to  evaluate  whether  a 
 grant  serves  the  public  interest.  It  is  a  responsibility  that  I  take  with  the  utmost 
 seriousness  and  it  will  continue  to  be  the  critical  determination  in  my  decisions  on  this 
 Commission. 
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