Trinity Broadcasting Faces ‘Spiritual Battle’ With FCC

TUSTIN — Trinity Broadcasting Network is appealing for funds on the air and on the Internet, saying the behemoth Christian TV system is in jeopardy because of a pending Federal Communications Commission case against it.

“Your TBN is facing a very serious spiritual battle,” the network’s World Wide Web page says of the FCC battle, which stems from a 1995 ruling that the network set up a sham minority corporation to take advantage of minority preferences for broadcast licenses.

The network launched a telethon this week to raise funds and call on viewers to help the network determine how to deal with the legal problem. The telethon ended Friday night.

“Strong forces in our country want to SILENCE this Mighty Voice. And how can MILLIONS receive the Gospel message without Christian TV coming into their homes?” the Web site reads. “. . . Please be faithful with your gifts and pledges--the legal costs are soaring!”

Trinity Broadcasting Network is one of the world’s largest religious-TV systems, with 15 full-power TV stations in the U.S., plus a radio network and more than 20 TV stations around the world. It also operates hundreds of low-power stations whose ownership is not regulated by the FCC.

Paul Crouch, who founded the network with his wife, Jan, called the dispute “an honorable controversy” in an Internet update on the matter. “I would rather be charged by men for trying to secure too many stations, than to be charged by God for trying to secure too few.”

A blistering November 1995 ruling of FCC Administrative Law Judge Joseph Chackin stated that the network and Crouch “committed serious, willful and repeated violations of the Communications Act and its rules.”

Those rules have since been overhauled as part of the sweeping Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996.

According to the 1995 decision, Crouch took unfair advantage of commission regulations established to encourage minorities to own TV and radio stations, setting up a phony minority group that he controlled.

The ruling was the result of a challenge to Trinity Broadcasting of Florida when the network tried to renew its license at WHFT in Miami. A civil rights group joined a rival broadcasting group to challenge that renewal on the grounds that Trinity exercised too much control over the minority company it had set up.

The Miami case has been appealed to the full FCC, but a final decision is not expected until at least the end of the year, said Colby May, Trinity’s Washington, D.C., attorney. If Chackin’s decision is upheld, Trinity will be forced to go off the air in Miami, May said.

The FCC is waiting for resolution of the Miami case before issuing a decision on a similar challenge to a Trinity station that broadcasts in Atlanta and Monroe, Ga. In addition, a ruling against Trinity could set off challenges to its stations in Santa Ana and New York, May said, and to an affiliate in Portland, Ore.

May said the telethon has posed a question to viewers: Should Trinity submit to efforts to silence some stations and possibly drive its message from the airwaves elsewhere, should it try to settle matters with the FCC before a final decision is reached, or should the network build a “war chest” for legal fees, possibly taking the matter as high as the U.S. Supreme Court?

“As a matter of strategy and as a matter of getting some confirmation from God as far as what viewers want to have happen, Dr. Crouch is putting before them the option of different ways to go,” May said.