NorthEast Radio Watch 11/10/2025: What Next For A Post-Shutdown FCC?

In this week’s issue… FCC faces reopening challenges – Veteran Boston anchor retires – Morning shift in Toronto – NYC FMs expand reach 

By SCOTT FYBUSH

*As we put this week’s column to bed on Sunday night, the rumor mill from Washington is abuzz about a possible deal to end what’s now the longest federal government shutdown in history, now at 40 days and counting.

Your editor retired from political journalism last year for all sorts of very good reasons, so we’re not going to use this space for any kind of larger speculation about what’s brewing right now in DC. But as for what happens when the wheels of government begin turning again with enough momentum to reopen the FCC? That’s still very much within our wheelhouse here in NERW.

First and perhaps foremost, an FCC that’s been shut down for almost a month and a half is going to return to what we’d expect to be at least a small flood of applications that will need processing. One of the reasons we’ve had to skip a couple of issues and put out some others that are thinner than usual is because so much of the news that we report here comes out of reading all those filings that normally move through the commission on a daily basis.

We know there are station sales that have been announced during the shutdown that couldn’t be filed – and we have every reason to believe there are other transactions we simply don’t know about because nothing’s been filed. All of those applicants are going to be eager for relatively speedy action from commission staffers as they get back to work. We have even less visibility during a shutdown into other bits of the daily give and take that usually happens with the FCC. Who’s suffered technical issues that have forced them to file for special temporary authority? Who’s gone dark completely? We’ll no doubt have at least a few surprises once those filings start trickling back in.

Then there are the filings that would have been due during the shutdown, such as the quarterly issues and programs reports that all stations would have been required to submit in early October and the ETRS Form One filings for EAS systems that would also have been due during the shutdown. As with every shutdown, the FCC will almost certainly provide extensions for at least a few days to avoid having its systems swamped by submissions.

And then there are the bigger issues that the Commission left unanswered when the shutdown began. The question of ownership caps remains a major one for regulators when they’re back in action, in no small part because Nexstar, already a massive owner of local TV stations, still hopes to close its proposed deal to acquire Tegna’s TV portfolio, a move that would create hugely dominant (and until now, impossible) combinations of local licenses and newsrooms in Buffalo, Scranton, Hartford and elsewhere.

Can the overall deregulatory trend in Washington give some of the bigger radio operators what they want, too? We know some of them are watching closely to see if the FCC will loosen the local caps that restrict one owner to no more than five FMs in even the largest market – and we know there are some deals poised to be made if and when that were to happen.

It’s a lot to have on the regulatory platter right now, as the holiday season fast approaches. And if we do in fact get an FCC up and running again, we’ll be right here chronicling whatever happens next, and getting you (and us) caught up on everything we might have missed in the meantime.