Brian Dogde slapped by FCC, finally

[Scott Fybush]

I'm told the Knox Marsh Road site is gone - foreclosure sale, followed 
by the removal of the tower, which went to Jim Bleikamp in Maine and is 
now being used by his WCME 900. I hope he performed an exorcism on it 
when he put it back up!

s

On 11/1/2016 10:22 AM, Paul B. Walker, Jr. wrote:
> The WWNH site is easy to find if you know what to look for, but still hard,
> if that makes sense. It's on Knox Marsh Road, Route 155 just as you get
> into Madury from Dover. It's so close to dover, that you could use 284 Knox
> Marsh Road, Madury or 284 Knox Marsh Road Dover as an address.
>
> There was a sign at the end of the road that leads up to WWNH. Theres a
> landscaping company of some kind next to the radio station and to the right
> of their property is a dirt road that elads up a few hundred feet to a
> driveway you turn right into and that clearing back on the woods is WWNH.
> You will never see the 1340 tower from the road
>
> Dodge is a douchecanoe, an asshat.. he's unfit to own gas stations let
> alone radio stations.
>
> I worked for him for a few months and the stuff he told me, the stuff he
> believed to be ok/legal with regards to radio stations was beyond
> incredulous.
>
> The only other person who really knew Dodge even better then me, Ernie
> Rice, is dead.
>
> Paul
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 9:55 AM, Garrett Wollman <wollman@bimajority.org>
> wrote:
>
>> Scott reported on Monday about an FCC consent decree released last
>> Thursday between the Media Bureau, Brian A. Dodge, and parties
>> associated with Dodge.
>>
>> Apparently the FCC first started having doubts about Dodge's
>> operations back in the late 1980s, when his "Harvest Broadcasting" was
>> involved in an applicaton for a new FM in Poughkeepsie.  Questions
>> were raised then about Harvest's qualifications as a licensee, but the
>> matter was left unresolved after being designated for a hearing,
>> because Harvest's application was dismissed for failure to prosecute.
>>
>> Dodge continued to apply for numerous other authorizations, using a
>> variety of aliases and front groups, some of the alleged directors of
>> which were actually dead at the time.  The FCC put a "red light hold"
>> on his application for a license to cover at WWNH (1340 Madbury), but
>> some other applications, including numerous translators and two LPFMs,
>> slipped through by creative use of pseudonyms.
>>
>> Rather than give Dodge the metaphorical "death penalty", which it
>> would be fully entitled to do, but which would require substantial
>> resources to gather evidence and hold hearings before an
>> administrative law judge, the FCC in the consent decree agrees to let
>> Dodge keep WWNH and a number of his translators.  Two of his granted
>> LPFM permits are cancelled, as well as the license to WCKL (560
>> Catskill), and he must admit wrongdoing and pay a $100,000 fine out of
>> the sale proceeds of two of his translators.  The remaining translator
>> licenses are modified to show Dodge as the licensee and given
>> short-term renewals.
>>
>> Last time I was in Madbury I went looking for the WWNH CP site and
>> couldn't find it.  Scott and I saw it back in 1995 on one of our
>> earliest trips, when it was still on the air.  Dodge still has some
>> work to do, to convince the FCC that the facilities (if they even
>> still exist) actually match the original CP, since that's the facility
>> that the application for a license to cover would authorize.
>>
>> -GAWollman
>>
>>