I filed an FCC complaint about NPR affiliate WJCT, whose license is up for renewal during 2019-2020. No response from WJCT to my concerns until late in the day on Friday, December 28, 2018.
Look forward to talking with station management next week.
Here's the list:
1. Dead air and technical difficulties. Frequent times with no sound, as for 32 minutes commencing 9:59 PM, December 24, 2018, dropped network programs or nonfunctioning local telephone call-in equipment.
2. Conflicts of interest. Frequent fawning coverage of sponsors and prospective purchasers of radio station property.
3. Tunnel vision coverage of matters of interest mainly to Jacksonville, especially to downtown economic interests, eschewing any investigative coverage of interest to residents of other counties in WJCT's claimed service area. Is WJCT becoming a "vast wasteland," in former FCC Chair Newton Minow's words?
4. Ignoring St. Johns County corruption and development issues.
5. Failure in 2018 to cover corrupt St. Johns County Sheriff David Shoar's office Michelle O'Connell murder coverup and financial scandals ($700,000 embezzlement).
6. Failure to cover development, clearcutting, tree killing wetland destroying coastal "developers" that are ruining St. Augustine and St. Johns County.
7. Payola? Affording Jacksonville Business Journal and others access to present as news what is essentially PR handouts, while allowing Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Currie free publicity for his re-election campaign by playing a hurricane PSA hundreds of times, annoyingly mispronouncing the word "library").
8. Spending 56+ hours/week of low-cost repetitive canned music, where other NPR stations carry BBC, CBC and other original programming.
9. Bragging in its fundraising about its signal failure to work with university communications department, failing to afford learning opportunities for journalism students, while running a "news" operation in name only, one that manages one decent interview program five days a week, but one that can 't or won't investigate wrongdoers in our Northeast Florida region.
10. As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "our lives begin to end the moment we stop caring about the things that matter."
11. Please request WJCT to e-mail me its public inspection file and discuss with FCC and me the ways it can do better in 2019.
12. That might start with local coverage on Sheriff David Shoar's corruption equal to or exceeding the "PEAK FLORIDA" investigative coverage by University of Florida's NPR affiliate, WUFT, concerning development (a series that provided excellent coverage of St. Augustine's Fish Island development) a series still NOT carried by WJCT, a provincial station that censors criticism of dodgy developers' demolition derby of our nature and history here in the Nation's Oldest City and environs.
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