Finding station owner in FCC Radio Database

[levander]

I want information about who owns what stations. And, was hoping to find these in the FCC Radio Database available via download from here:

http://www.fcc.gov/mb/databases/cdbs/

I know that ClearChannel owns Atlanta's WKLS station called 96 Rock on channel 96.1 FM. However, I've spent the last few hours looking through those files and can't find an ownership relationship between WKLS and ClearChannel. I was just using WKLS as an example. I'd really like to write some software that allows me to lookup station owners. I figured if I could figure out how the relationship works in the database for WKLS and ClearChannel, it would work pretty much the same for all the channels.

Is it possible to find station owners in the FCC radio database? Is there another (preferrable free of course) database that I can find this stuff in?

Thanks.

 

[n4voxgill]

start here and it will lead to the correct place to search. When you get to license the click on station information

http://www.fcc.gov/mb/audio/new-visitors.html#AMFMQUERY

 

[Al42]

I want information about who owns what stations. And, was hoping to find these in the FCC Radio Database available via download from here:

http://www.fcc.gov/mb/databases/cdbs/

I know that ClearChannel owns Atlanta's WKLS station called 96 Rock on channel 96.1 FM. However, I've spent the last few hours looking through those files and can't find an ownership relationship between WKLS and ClearChannel.

The relationships are at ftp://ftp.fcc.gov/pub/Bureaus/MB/Databases/cdbs/_Engineering_Data_Description.pdf or http://www.fcc.gov/ftp/Bureaus/MB/Databases/cdbs/_readme.html (scroll down). You'll need the application table to get the IDs for the callsign and probably ownership_structure for the owner's name (linked by application_id). Kind of trivial.

 

[n4voxgill]

If you follow the link I gave above it shows this for the station. I don't know who Citicasters is, but that is who hold the license.

Station Search Details
Call Sign: WKLS
Facility Id: 11275
Community of License: ATLANTA, GA
Service: FM
Fac Type: FM STATION
Status: LICENSED
Status Date:
Frequency: 96.1
Channel: 241
Digital Status: Hybrid
Lic Expir: 04/01/2012
Licensee: CITICASTERS LICENSES, L.P.
Address: 2625 S MEMORIAL DR, SUITE A
Address 2:
City: TULSA
State: OK
Zip Code: 74129 - 2623
Phone Number: (918) 664-4581
Engineering Data View Engineering Data
Call Sign History View Call Sign History
FRN History View FRN History

 

[Microwavemike]

Public File

The same info can be found by going down to the station and looking at their " Puplic File ". All radio stations MUST have these and anybody can inspect the whole file. Any station that will not show you it's Public File risk very large fines.

Makes good reading.


mm

 

[n4voxgill]

Here is a site with just stations Clear Channel owns

http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners/clearchannel.asp

I see that the station appears on this list so Clear Channel must own Citicasters. Gets hard to follow ownership.

 

[levander]

Thanks guys. My scenario here is I'm trying to write some software to do this, so going down to the station to retrieve the public file or going to company specific web sites isn't what I'm looking for.

But, yeah, I did get through the fcc database I mentioned to find that Citicasters is the licensee for WKLS. However, I was thinking that's probably just some dummy company Clearstation set up to do the FCC paperwork, probably just for legal reasons. Wouldn't be very informative.

However, what I guess I could do, is associate the stations with all these dummy companies, but make sure that my software associates each company with a Company that would be that Company's owner. Recursively going up this relationship until you get to a company that doesn't have an owner. Then, this parent company would be the only thing displayed to the user.

If the parent companies aren't in the fcc database, then these parent companies would have to be slowly added as the database matures.

But, it would really, really be nice to be able to find the "real" companies that own these radio stations just in the fcc database, or via some other publically available information.

 

[Al42]

But, it would really, really be nice to be able to find the "real" companies that own these radio stations just in the fcc database, or via some other publically available information.

The FCC keeps the name of the company that registers as the "owner" - it doesn't keep records of who owns which corporations.

What you could do is keep a separate table of "owners" and the final parent corporation of each one. Then your program could show the "owner" and the real owner. But you'd have to search out the real owner of the various "owner" corporations yourself. (It's called "piercing the corporate veil".)

 

[levander]

What you could do is keep a separate table of "owners" and the final parent corporation of each one. Then your program could show the "owner" and the real owner. But you'd have to search out the real owner of the various "owner" corporations yourself. (It's called "piercing the corporate veil".)

Yeah, don't know why I couldn't accept that when I was digging through the fcc database. Piercing the corporate veil is an interesting phrase, I'll try to use that on my UI.

And, what I was trying to describe in last post, is I think I'm going to have one table, called Company. However, one column will a field parent_company. So, a company could have a parent, that company could have a parent, etc. When I display a station's owner, I will go all the way to the top parent that doesn't have an owner.

It's basically the same thing you described, only implemented differently.

Thanks a lot guys, I would be surprised if there were another forum on the entire internet where I would have gotten as many responses on this topic.