FCC Rejects Petition Against 3 Fox Stations

The Federal Communications Commission’s Media Bureau has turned down a watchdog group’s effort to block the renewals of the Fox Television Stations Inc. licenses in Washington (DC) and Baltimore (MD), holding that the group had not made the case for an agency crackdown, despite allegations of phone-hacking and other wrongdoing by News Corp. subsidiaries in the United Kingdom. The group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, asked the FCC last August to block the renewal applications of Fox for its WTTG and WDCA Washington and WUTB in Baltimore, citing the phone-hacking and bribery scandal that rocked Fox parent News Corp. and its chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch last year.