Clear Channel Helping Minorities Pursue Its Stations
A 3-day conference seeks to help women and minorities bid on 42 TV stations and 448 small-market radio broadcasters that Clear Channel is trying to sell (CD Nov 17 p1). The event has drawn over 120 registrants, said Clear Channel, lauded in 2000 by activists for divesting 40 stations to minority firms as part of a large transaction. Conference topics include regulation, business planning and investment issues key for would-be station buyers. Participants get face time with Clear Channel executives, media brokers, communications lawyers and broadcast engineers. Today (Fri.), private equity firms will meet minority and female executives. Held at NAB’s D.C. hq, the event is sponsored by Clear Channel.
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Clear Channel hopes to have a smooth regulatory ride for its $26.7 billion sale to 2 private equity firms. The firm wants to avoid a vote by FCC commissioners on its return to private ownership by Thomas Lee and Bain Capital, said a Commission official, citing talks with company officials. That intent shows in paperwork the company filed last month with the Commission. Clear Channel is structuring the sale to avoid needing waivers of media ownership rules, it said. Commissioners generally must vote on such waivers.
“It looks like they want to avoid any request for a waiver,” said the Commission official. Few Clear Channel radio stations have waivers or come under “the Commission’s grandfathering rules,” said a company filing. An FCC grandfather clause lets broadcasters keep stations rendered noncompliant by a 2003 rule change that left some companies having more than the maximum number of stations they were permitted to own in a given market.
“The parties are not seeking any waiver to permit continued ownership of such non-compliant combinations,” a company filing said, noting that Clear Channel holds temporary ownership-limit waivers “in a very small number of cases.” In the cases of all stations with waivers and grandfather clauses, Clear Channel wants to sell them before the deal to go private is completed or when it occurs, it said, adding that as a backstop, it will create a trust for the stations. Formation of such a trust would help Clear Channel persuade the FCC that there was no change in control warranting waivers, industry officials have said.