Talk:RKO

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This article is fairly well done, but there's an issue in the description of what happened to WNAC that I haven't figured out how to rephrase. Until rules changes in the 1980s, the FCC's rules allowed for new license applications mutually exclusive with the renewal of an existing license. (Today, there is a presumption of renewal.) Emboldened by lingering doubts about RKO's billing practices at KHJ, and by the FCC's decision in the Herald Traveler case, two different groups applied for the channel 7 license.

The actual wrongdoing which caused WNAC-TV to lose its license did not tale place until the mid-1970s! It was a tribute, of sorts, to the other two applicants that they managed to drag out the competitive hearings long enough for RKO General to trip. The two competing applicants would later merge to form New England Television Corp., which was eventually granted a new license for WNEV-TV. (The article implies that the license was somehow transferred ffrom RKO to NE-TV; this is not so. WNEV was a new license.)

In the late 1970s, when things started to turn against them, GTR executives appeared before the FCC and offered to sell RKO General to an unrelated third party; the FCC replied that one cannot sell a license one does not have. The only license they actually lost was the WNAC-TV license; RKO was ultimately able to sell all of the other stations (including WRKO and WROR(FM) in Boston), and they were able to sell the facilities and intellectual property of WNAC-TV to the new licensee. (NE-TV was controlled by David Mugar, heir to the Star supermarket fortune.) The Boston radio stations went to a company called Atlantic Ventures, later American Radio Systems, and now part of Viacom's Infinity Broadcasting unit. --Garrett Wollman, editor, The Archives @ BostonRadio.org.

[edit] Defunct companies category

I have added this to the defunct companies category because it sounds like the "resurrected" entity renamed RKO Pictures does not share continuity or the character of the famous original, which is the defunct company referred to. --Gary D 07:10, 15 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Hmm it's descended from the original so there is continuity but yeah i'd agree that that the character is not the same. PMA 10:55, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)