NorthEast Radio Watch 10/13/2025: The FCC in Shutdown Times

In this week’s issue… With no FCC, now what? – CRTC loosens licensing rules – iHeart cuts hit Philly – Seven Mountains expands “GOAT,” Hanna brands in PA – Hot 97 adds TV – Remembering NYC’s Swayze, Canada’s Blackadar, Trudeau

By SCOTT FYBUSH

*As we enter the third full week of the U.S. government shutdown, there’s a lot that we can’t do right now here in NERW, or in our day job as Fybush Media/StationSale.com.

Wondering who’s buying or selling radio stations right now? Nobody, at least on this side of the border, since even though we know there are some transactions in the works, nothing can get filed with an FCC that isn’t open for business.

A lot of this column’s material is derived from the technical filings that are made every day at the FCC, but those, too, are on hold (including a few for our own clients) as long as there’s no FCC staff on the job to review or approve them. Without access to most of the FCC’s databases, we’re even stalled out when it comes to putting applications together for clients waiting to have them ready to file whenever the shutdown ends and the FCC reopens for business.

Call letter changes? None of those for now, either, because, again, absent a functioning FCC, there’s nobody around to process those applications, either.

And a lot of the daily business broadcasters themselves do with the FCC is likewise on hold – there’s no ability, for instance, to file the quarterly issues and programs lists that were due last week, or the ETRS reports that were also due in early October for each station’s EAS equipment.

Those deadlines will remain pushed back during the shutdown, and they’ll likely get a bit of an extension even after the shutdown ends, but it’s also entirely unclear when that’s actually going to happen given what looks like some especially intense gridlock in Washington.

All of which is to say, there’s going to be a little less NERW for the moment since there’s just not as much that we’re able to report, so it’s likely the column will appear every other week for the moment unless there’s breaking news, or unless there’s once again a regulator able to handle the business of the nation’s broadcasters.

(Meanwhile, as you’ll read later on in this week’s column, regulators in Canada are very much on the job, and actually working on the kind of lightening of the regulatory load on broadcasters that has so far been more words than action from Brendan Carr’s FCC down here.)