Court Opinion

ID: 9473036
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 04:17:41.371123+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:43:17.097882
License: Public Domain

MacKINNON, Senior Circuit Judge
(concurring in part & dissenting in part).
In my opinion the majority’s standard is so lax as to when the Federal Communications Commission must require a hearing under § 309 of the Communications Act that it amounts to no standard at all. The Committee to Save KQED offers what may charitably be called an implausible interpretation of undisputed facts. Fancying themselves the guardians of the public interest, the appellants have done nothing more than vent their suspicions that behind KQED’s decision to replace faulty equipment lurked a desire to circumvent the Commission’s instructions. But this suspicion does not raise any question of material fact.
This becomes obvious when we examine just what the factual “dispute” is that the majority argues compels the FCC to hold a hearing. KQED took one of its public television stations off the air for a limited period. It did so, the station told the FCC, to replace a faulty master switcher. According to Mr. Kroll, members of the KQED board made various remarks, or failed to make remarks, in a way that might be interpreted to mean that this deactivation was entirely for budgetary reasons. (J.A. 269.) The appellants, hearing this, alleged before the FCC that the “darkening” of the station was not really to replace equipment, but in fact for “budgetary reasons.” It might strike a businessman that decisions about when and how to replace equipment are not altogether unrelated to budgets, but the Committee to Save KQED was in fact alleging that *684KQED was shutting down one of its stations out of a generalized intent to save money, rather than out of a specific intent to replace equipment in the cheapest way possible. As we shall see, this curious distinction is as puzzling as it first appears. KQED then protested that all its talk1 about budgets was not meant to say that it was shutting down one of its stations just because it could not in general afford to operate it, but because it could not afford to hire out substitute facilities to keep the station on the air while it was replacing its faulty equipment. (J.A. 322-23.) The FCC was satisfied that this explanation was truthful, found it to be adequate when it considered the petition for rehearing and therefore declined to hold an evidentiary hearing into the matter.
Now the majority rules that the Committee to Save KQED has raised a substantial and material question of fact that merits a hearing by claiming KQED’s real intent was not to replace equipment but in general just to save money. The question of fact to be addressed at this hearing must indeed be that of intent, in its purest metaphysical sense, for no more concrete question of fact remains to be settled. It is, for example, undisputed that the equipment in question was in fact faulty and needed to be replaced, that extraordinary measures would indeed have been necessary for KQED to keep the station on the air while the new equipment was installed, that these measures would have cost a station already in great financial duress at least $1000 per week beyond normal, budgeted operating expenses (J.A. 321, 329-30), that KQED initially attempted to bear these extraordinary expenses {id.), that problems beyond KQED’s control caused the delays in the equipment repair (J.A. 328-31), and that once the equipment was repaired, the station did in fact go back on the air. If KQED was in fact harboring some bad motive, it was not discernible in its actions. This leaves unsolved the mystery of where the Commission is supposed to look for the real reason KQED decided to replace its master switcher, once it moves, that is, beyond the perhaps too obvious explanation that it was broken.
Nor is it clear what an evidentiary hearing could accomplish. For example, the appellants do not want to run the station themselves (Transcript of Oral Argument 10). Appellants state that they are merely asking for “a hearing before the FCC to determine whether in fact the station is keeping its obligations and observing its obligations as a licensee.” Id. But it is obscure what legal obligation, as opposed to the moral obligation to be sincere, appellants allege KQED has violated in saving money by making a necessary technical repair.
We should respect the knowledge and expertise the Commission exercised in deciding whether KQED’s explanation was truthful. But not doing so, the majority opinion founders on the problem that it is always possible to infer some bad motive from a set of actions and statements, even if there is a more plausible explanation available. This decision would seem to require the FCC to hold that the burden of raising a substantial and material question of fact can be satisfied merely by taking a dim view of actions that on their face appear perfectly legal and reasonably motivated. This statutory standard must have more to it than that. This unfortunate result, moreover, is unnecessary. WEBR v. FCC, 420 F.2d 158 (D.C.Cir.1969) may reasonably be taken to leave questions about misrepresentations of fact within the province of the Commission. And Citizens Committee to Save WEFM v. FCC, 506 F.2d 246 (D.C.Cir.1974) (en banc) certainly does not imply that it is enough to present allegations of bad intent merely consistent with undisputed facts in order to get a hearing. That case involved allegations of mismanagement that would be verifiable once WEFM’s books were looked into, and, more analogously to this case, an allegation of misrepresentation that was buttressed by evidence of contradictory statements of intent by the licensee. There is no such evidence here. Here we have only the Committee’s theories about what KQED officials’ real motives were when they tern*685porarily darkened the station, and the station’s entirely consistent claim that the budgetary reasons for redarkening after December 1979, when the station was activated for three weeks, was that keeping the station going during repairs was creating extraordinary, non-budgeted expenses.
The majority also seems to assert that it is unbelievable that KQED was required to darken a station because of equipment failure. The court may find it hard to believe that a public television station with a yearly budget of $14 million would worry about wasting a mere $1000 per week. See Majority Opinion at 15 n. 5. But this conviction is just a guess about the real stringencies under which public television operates compared to the FCC’s informed judgment. It may be that KQED welcomed the opportunity that the broken master switcher afforded the station to save money by closing temporarily. It is, however, the laws of economics, not the law of the land, that decrees that public television stations should always lose money. If the master switcher’s breaking actually saved KQED money, this is more an artifact of the peculiar economics of the public sector than it is evidence of misrepresentation. No one has alleged that it was wrong for KQED to take advantage of the darkening to save money. No one has alleged that it was under a legal obligation to go over budget to stay on the air. Indeed, at oral argument, the Commission made it clear that it assumed KQED viewed the equipment failure as a piece of good luck (Transcript of Oral Argument 23). No one has suggested KQED violated its obligations as a licensee in so doing. Because there is no dispute that the master switcher did in fact break, that it had to be replaced, and that operating out of rented quarters would have been extraordinarily expensive, there is no material question of fact left to be settled. All the Committee has in fact alleged is that KQED was glad to have a broken master switcher to replace. If there is an argument that otherwise legal acts, accompanied by bad intent, are illegal under the Communications Act, or otherwise present an issue the Commission should look into at a hearing, it has not been presented to this court. And even such an argument would presuppose that intending to save money during the replacement of the switcher, as KQED did, was bad, a supposition that seems arguable at best. To raise any substantial question of misrepresentation, there must be more, I should hope, than a suspicion someone is not unburdening himself of every possible feeling, e.g. relief, that might be associated with an act. The Commission might well find it impossible to comply with the mandate of the majority’s decision.
For the reasons stated above therefore I respectfully dissent from the majority’s analysis and holding concerning the misrepresentation claim. In the remainder of the opinion, I concur.