FCC Asked To Pull Rupert Murdoch's Fox Broadcast Licenses After Phone Hacking Report
The Huffington Post
An ethics watchdog group is calling on the FCC to revoke Fox's broadcasting licenses in the wake of the bombshell phone hacking report released on Tuesday.
The Guardian reports that Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (Crew) has written to FCC chairman Julius Genachowski asking that he withdraw Rupert Murdoch's licenses on the grounds of character. The news comes one day after Parliament came to a damning verdict about Murdoch's handling of the long-running phone hacking scandal at News Corp.
On Tuesday, the Culture, Media and Sport committee concluded that he was "not a fit person" to run a major international company, and that he "turned a blind eye and exhibited willful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications."
Crew director Melanie Sloane argued that the report had major implications for American regulators. "If they are not passing the character standard under British law, it seems to me that they are not going to meet the character standard in America," she told the Guardian. Current FCC regulations require that media owners must have good "character" and serve the "public interest."
Thus far, however, the agency has kept its distance from the drama surrounding Murdoch's British properties. When the scandal broke last July, Genachowski maintained that phone hacking should be investigated, but did not say that the FCC would launch its own probe.
