Fox’s Founding President Joins Fight to Deny Fox Broadcast License

Jamie Kellner, the founding president of Fox Broadcasting Company, added his voice on Tuesday to a bipartisan bid to deny the broadcast license renewal of a local Philadelphia station owned by Fox Corporation. Joining a growing coalition that includes other former Fox executives, commentators, and the former head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Kellner added his informal objection to the formal petition to deny Fox 29 Philadelphia’s license that the Media and Democracy Project (MAD) filed with the FCC last month. MAD claims that Fox failed the FCC’s “character” qualifications by airing “false news about the 2020 election, citing Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox that was settled for $787.5 million. In his filing, Kellner says he “worked hard to establish the Fox brand in television and to help Rupert Murdoch become an established force in American Network television.” Kellner, who was hired by Murdoch in 1986, added: “Unlike the news feeds provided today by Fox News Channel, our news feeds did not prominently feature advocates like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell spouting nonsensical lies about a Presidential election.” He called on the FCC to “designate the application for a hearing to evaluate the Murdochs’/Fox’s character qualifications.” Fox filed an opposition to the petition earlier this month, claiming the rejection of its station’s broadcast license would put the FCC “on a collision course with the First Amendment.”