TBN DENIED MIAMI TV STATION LICENSE

A ruling last spring by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was a moral setback for Paul Crouch and his Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN). According to an Evangelical News report, “the FCC found that TBN attempted to circumvent federal limits on TV station ownership by creating a sham minority-controlled company to hold the license.”

The debate concerning WHFT, Channel 45, in Miami, Fla., had been raging for a number of years. In August 1994, a legal document before the FCC charged that, “Trinity Broadcasting Network abused the Commission’s processes by using NMTV [National Minority Television, Inc.] as a vehicle to claim unwarranted minority and diversification preferences. The record clearly established that Trinity Broadcasting Network created NMTV for the purposes of seeking an anticipated low power minority preference as part of a plan for a network of stations designed to further Trinity Broadcasting Network’s religious mission.”

In the judgment, handed down April 15, the FCC determined that “TBN founder Paul Crouch was principally to blame for the creation of National Minority Television as part of a plan to control more full-power stations than he was allowed under federal law.”

Crouch is the president of TBN, which he founded in Southern California in 1973. It has grown to become the largest religious broadcaster with a worldwide network of more than 800 broadcast and cable outlets.

The FCC ruling will not affect any of the other stations under the ownership of TBN. An attorney for the religious broadcaster said that TBN “would continue to litigate and to vindicate itself, and eventually win the renewal of its Miami station.”

—MKG

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