It's not often that my comments in another blog lead to a post, but there are some issues brought up in the comments to this post by Boz that should be expounded on.
When I worked for ASCAP I dealt with a number of broadcasters, most of whom were decent, but a few were, to be charitable, reprobates. First there was Fred Cote, who used to own Radio Stations KMET and KOLA-FM in Redlands, CA. In 1991, he hired his stations' board operator to murder his estranged wife's lover, fled to Hawaii and was arrested boarding a plane to Argentina. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 1994. Cote's stations went into receivership and were sold with his wife getting 50% of the proceeds under California's community property law.
There was also Michael Rice, the sole owner of Contemporary Media. In 1994 [ed. note: obviously a good year for convicting bad broadcasters] Rice was convicted of our counts of forcible sodomy, six counts of deviate sexual assault in the first degree, and two counts of deviate sexual assault in the second degree and sentenced to 85 years in prison, with the sentences running concurrently.
Rice eventually lost his stations' FCC licenses (which are essentially the value of the station; all the equipment and talent does you no good if you cannot legally broadcast) and attempted to fight the loss of the licenses in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, but was denied.
I mention this in the context of the Chávez government's refusal to renew RCTV's license. To my knowledge, while there have been legal challenges by RCTV to this matter, there was no determination to not renew the license other than the Chávez government's denial. No administrative law hearings, no right of appeals.
Apparently a convicted pedophile in the US has his days in court to preserve his ownership of a television network in Venezuela whose operators have been convicted of nothing do not get their day in court.
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