It may be National Tell A Joke Day, but the Federal Communications Commission doesn’t consider its Emergency Alert System a laughing matter.
The agency has fined several TV broadcast, cable and radio networks a collective $600,000 for misusing or simulating the tones, which are intended to be used over television and on cellphones to alert people to emergencies such as tornadoes and floods, or to deliver public service announcements.
The penalized programs include ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and Discovery’s “Lone Star Law,” as well as promotions played the Meruelo Radio Holdings, LLC’s Los Angeles-area KDAY and KDEY-FM’s radio stations.
Kimmel played the emergency alarm three times during a sketch mocking the presidential alert system on Oct. 3, 2018, the same day that millions of phones across the country received a presidential alert reading, “THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed.”
“The idea of letting President Trump send a text message to every American whenever he wants to may sound like a bad idea, and it is a bad idea,” Kimmel said on his show at the time. “But what do we do here in Hollywood when we have a bad idea? Make a major motion picture out of it.”
He then aired a mock movie trailer that featured Trump spamming the public’s phones, tablets, smartwatches and smartcar dashboards with a flurry of messages under the presidential alert and Emergency Alert System bulletins, which leads to mass chaos.
“The FCC’s rules prohibit such broadcasting of EAS tones – including simulations of them – except during actual emergencies, authorized tests or authorized public service announcements,” the agency explained in a release detailing the penalties. “These rules aim to protect the integrity of the alert system by helping to avoid confusion when the tones are used, alert fatigue among listeners, and false activation of the EAS by the operative data elements contained in the alert tones.”
It added that the Disney-owned
ABC admitted to the violation and agreed to pay the $395,000 fine and commit to a compliance plan. An ABC spokesperson told MarketWatch in a statement that, “ABC takes regulatory compliance seriously and we are pleased to have resolved this issue.”
“The Walking Dead” played EAS tones twice during its “Omega” episode last February, which featured a flashback of the beginning of the zombie outbreak where the alerts went off on people’s phones. AMC
agreed to pay a $104,000 fine, the FCC reported. And Discovery’s
“Lone Star Law” included the actual emergency alert, as the crew was filming Texas game wardens after Hurricane Harvey whose phones received the alarm. Discovery will pay a $68,000 fine. Neither network responded to MarketWatch requests for comment by presstime.
Finally, the Meruelo’s KDAY and KDEY-FM stations played simulations of the emergency alarm tone as a promotion for its morning show. The company will pay a $67,000 fine.
This is small change compared to some of the biggest FCC fines in history — such as the $3.6 million penalty it hit CBS and its affiliates with for a graphic 2004 “Without a Trace” episode that featured a teen orgy.
Shock jock Howard Stern amassed $1.7 million in fines for Infinity Broadcasting over various violations on the air in 1995 alone.
Perhaps most infamously, Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction during her 2004 Super Bowl Halftime Show performance with Justin Timberlake drew a $550,000 fine for CBS. But the indecency fine got thrown out after both a lower court and the Supreme Court agreed that the “wardrobe malfunction” was indeed an accident.
