Myers faced criticism in 2005 when he supported the National Weather Service Duties Act of 2005, a bill introduced by U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) that would have prohibited the National Weather Service from publishing weather data to the public when private-sector entities, such as AccuWeather, perform the same function commercially.
On January 16, 2012, KCAU, along with all of its sister stations, began broadcasting Disney/ABC's Live Well Network on its digital subchannel, replacing "Accuweather 9".
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Until January 16, 2012, KCAU was the only station owned by Citadel Communications to carry AccuWeather programming on a digital subchannel; sister stations KLKN, WOI-DT, and WHBF-TV instead carried RTV on their DT2 subchannels, while WLNE-TV did not offer a DT2 subchannel.
Mark Mancuso (born in West Newton, Massachusetts) is an American meteorologist formerly employed by The Weather Channel in Atlanta, Georgia and now with AccuWeather in State College, Pennsylvania.
In the wake of the bill's introduction, Santorum was accused of political impropriety and influence peddling because Joel Myers, the head of Pennsylvania-based AccuWeather and one of Santorum's constituents, was also a Santorum campaign contributor.
WTMJ-TV already carries Local AccuWeather in that market, but WMVS's digital AccuWeather subchannel is purposefully structured to meet non-commercial guidelines and focuses more on local mapping, while not making any mention of AccuWeather to speak of or airing LAWC content, substituting NOAA Weather Radio audio from local station KEC60 instead.
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The Local AccuWeather Channel is a 24-hour, weather-oriented, commercially sponsored broadcast and cable television network in the United States owned and operated by AccuWeather, Inc., which is headquartered in State College, Pennsylvania.
(The first option is not available, or at least legal, in Canada, where Environment Canada's forecasts are under crown copyright.) Accuweather (through United Stations) and The Weather Channel (through Dial Global's NBC Radio Network) both operate large national weather radio networks through AM and FM stations.