Bias Challenges Against Stations’ Licenses Soaring : Broadcasting: Civil rights groups have asked the government to revoke permission for 200 radio and TV outlets to operate. California may be the next battleground.

In the most sweeping challenge of the broadcast industry since the early 1970s, civil rights groups over the past 20 months have asked the Federal Communications Commission to revoke the licenses of more than 200 radio and TV stations that allegedly have not met FCC minority employment obligations.

On July 2, the NAACP and the National Hispanic Media Coalition filed their latest round of challenges--opposing the license renewals of 24 Texas radio stations. Those filings come on top of about 180 license challenges filed since 1988 by the two organizations, the United Latin American Citizens and the National Black Media Coalition. The groups say they expect to ask the FCC to revoke the licenses of 75 to 100 stations in Western states such as California, Arizona and Utah before the current license-renewal cycle ends in January.

“We are really gearing up for California radio stations” this fall, said Alan Clayton, executive director of the National Hispanic Media Coalition in Los Angeles. “We’ve looked at over 50 stations already, and some are just as bad or worse than the ones we filed against in Texas.”

Among the incidents cited in the complaints is the case of one South Carolina radio station that allegedly fired all its black employees and replaced them with whites after the station switched its music format from rhythm and blues to rock.

“We made a lot of progress when I was on the commission,” said Benjamin L. Hooks, who served as the nation’s first black FCC commissioner from 1972 to 1977 and now heads the NAACP. “And things improved when (black lawyer) Tyrone Brown succeeded me on the commission. But since then, the industry has slipped and things have gone backward.”

While the challenged stations represent only about 2% of the nation’s 11,000 broadcasters, the complaints have prompted the FCC to launch one of the most widespread reviews of broadcast hiring practices since Hooks served on the FCC. The same year Hooks was appointed, lawsuits by the United Church of Christ and other media activist groups prompted the agency--for the first time--to revoke a station’s license on grounds of discrimination. The Edmonds, Wash., station lost its license when the FCC found that it illegally discriminated by requiring its workers to adhere to the Christian religion.

While the FCC has since rarely revoked a station’s license on grounds of employment discrimination, it has for the first time in its 56-year history begun imposing fines against broadcasters and cable owners who don’t meet agency rules that require them to demonstrate that they have made efforts to recruit minorities and women for job openings and that they have not discriminated against job applicants.

“Very few of the petitions have ended up with no sanctions,” said Glenn A. Wolfe, FCC equal employment opportunity branch chief. “For the most part, there has been substance to the complaints.”

Wolfe said since 1988, 19 stations have been fined up to $20,000 each for failing to meet those rules, and dozens of others have had conditions placed on their license renewals. And since Congress raised the maximum fine to $250,000 this year, the financial penalty could become more onerous, he said.

The Federal Communications Commission, which oversees broadcasters, telephone companies and others in the communications industry, is the only federal agency that requires licensees under its jurisdiction to practice affirmative action. The agency reported that, in 1989, nearly 16% of all professionals working at broadcast stations were minority-group members and about 32% were women, compared to 8% and 10.2%, respectively, in 1971.

Ironically, 1989 saw the largest percentage increase in minority broadcast employment in more than a decade. But civil rights groups and FCC officials said the increase was largely a reaction to the huge number of petitions filed over the past two years.

Employment discrimination in broadcasting is not as widespread as it was before 1970, when few stations employed women, blacks or Latinos, said David Honig, a Miami lawyer who has represented the NAACP in many of the cases before the FCC. But Honig and FCC officials say stations today in many cases aren’t meeting their legal requirement to make strong efforts to recruit women and minorities. What’s more, they say, blacks and Latinos are sometimes denied opportunities to work on stations that switch to non-ethnic formats such as rock, classical music or talk radio.

In Connecticut, for example, the New Haven chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens alleged in a June 14 filing with the FCC that owners of Spanish-language radio station WLVH-FM “unlawfully fired all of the WLVH-FM Hispanic employees in order to satisfy a buyer who wanted to change the format.”

The group claims that Sage Broadcasting Corp. ditched its Spanish format, fired its Latino employees and retained a few white employees to run a station that broadcast nothing but weather reports.

“They created the economically ridiculous ruse of a ‘weather’ format requiring no staff,” the league claimed in its petition. “Unlike the Anglo employees (at the station), the Hispanic employees were not interviewed by (the new owner) and thus were given no opportunity to try out.”

In a lengthy response filed at the FCC on Wednesday, Sage called the allegations “a tapestry of speculation and surmise.”

The company’s lawyer, Allan Moskowitz, said “disgruntled employees” were behind the complaint and added that, of the three employees retained after the format change to run the weather station, “one was Hispanic.”

Moskowitz said more and more of his broadcasting clients have come under FCC scrutiny for possible employment discrimination in recent months. He attributed the increase to FCC rule changes that require stations to keep more rigorous employment records and more aggressively recruit minorities for job vacancies.

“In other words,” Moskowitz said, “you have got to beat the bushes to find minorities these days.”

But the FCC is investigating a similar case, brought by the South Carolina branch of the NAACP against a station in Columbia, S.C.

After station owner Price Broadcasting Co. changed its black-music format to rock, new white employees were brought in for jobs the station didn’t tell the black employees about when it fired them, the civil rights group claimed. Each of the terminated black employees had more seniority than the company’s existing white employees, none of whom was fired, the NAACP alleged.

Station owners could not be reached for comment.

Wolfe of the FCC said while minority employment has improved greatly since the Kerner Commission criticized broadcasters in 1968 for hiring too few minorities, deregulation of the industry a decade ago has made many broadcasters lax about their affirmative action obligations.

Since Congress lengthened license renewal terms in 1981 from three years to five years for television and seven years for radio, Wolfe said, station owners now “forget about their obligation to provide equal employment opportunity . . . and fall back on that network of knowing somebody who knows somebody.”