Dear stations –

Thank you for your continued commitment to providing a valuable public media service to your communities. We know that you take your responsibilities as FCC licensees seriously, and want to assure you that APM’s goal is to partner with you and provide consistently high-quality programming that is fully compliant with the FCC’s rules.

We have heard from some of you regarding your frustration with the EAS tones that aired during the BBC World Service program “Witness History.” APM understands—and shares—your frustration and is taking the issue seriously. In addition to strengthening our own compliance procedures, we have been in contact with the BBC and understand that they have updated their procedures to prevent such an incident from happening again.

As you know, APM notified affiliate stations via ContentDepot and the FCC of the “Witness History” EAS tone issue on May 25 and again on May 30 after learning that an additional edition had been impacted. APM did this on behalf of its owned stations (MPR News and LAist/SCPR) and as the distributor of BBC programming. We have not yet heard from FCC staff regarding the incident. However, based on previous FCC cases, we anticipate that the FCC will seek information from APM and that APM’s responses will serve as the foundation for the FCC’s investigation.

Ultimately, it could take more than a year for the issue to be resolved, but we anticipate that the FCC’s investigation will focus on APM and not individual stations. Additionally, while individual station fines are possible, APM anticipates that any fine would be assessed against it and not affiliate stations.

Thank you again for your commitment to public media

Please reach out to your station rep if you have any questions.

Thank you