Broadcasters' Disgraceful Behavior Leading Up to This Week's Digital Conversion

Anybody who has any doubts about the outrageous, excessive power of the major broadcasters should examine the sordid history of what's led up to Friday's switch from the analog to the digital spectrum.

Even two Republican Presidential nominees have expressed outrage at the too-powerful broadcasters' self-serving, rapacious behavior during the 15-year-long digital conversion.

Sen. Bob Dole, hardly a flaming liberal, has stated that he was appalled at the powerful broadcasting industry's disgraceful rip-off of the digital spectrum, which TV owners got absolutely free in the mid-90's, costing the taxpayers billions of dollars in one of the largest government giveaways ever. Dole and others in Congress had called for an auction of the valuable digital spectrum. Wireless companies were willing to pay billions for it at an auction.

The National Association of Broadcasters, which is arguably even more powerful on Capitol Hill than the NRA, beat down this idea with a small army of lobbyists. The NAB does its dirty work far more quietly than Wayne Lapierre's pistoleros.

Broadcasters are used to getting things for free from the government - things like, say, radio and TV station licenses.

Once they got their hands on the digital spectrum -- for free -- the broadcasters reneged on their promise to hand the old ones (UHF, VHF) back to the government by 2006, causing an irate Sen. John McCain to call them "spectrum squatters." Police, firefighters and other first-responders had been screaming for more spectrum space for years, especially after 9-11.

Our public-spirited broadcasters could have cared less.

Even the conservative Heritage Foundation complained:

"The net effect of this was to grant existing broadcasters use of two huge blocks of spectrum, free of charge. This giveaway raised quite a few eyebrows because elsewhere the FCC was auctioning the use of valuable spectrum to the highest bidders. Aside from the billions in lost government revenue, the plan left broadcasters with little incentive to return their old spectrum."

And predictably, they didn't. They've drawn the process out for three years now, not wanting to give up their over-the-air bandwidth even as they also broadcast on the digital spectrum. In short, they want to have it all.

This week's latest conversion, you may recall, was supposed to have happened in February. But broadcasters complained that not enough people with antenna reception had digital converter boxes.

And the broadcasters were willing to chip in a few bucks to help pay for those boxes, right?
You must be kidding. Not these freeloaders.

(Canada, by the way, doesn't make the conversion to digital for another two years. So if you live up by the border as I do, you're in luck. )

The broadcasters/cable owners refuse to do TV news stories about the damage wrought by media consolidation. They're also used to treating their supposed regulators, the FCC, as their lapdog. And they'll surely fight and sue the pants off anyone who ever tries to make broadcasters give free airtime to political candidates as a condition of license, just as broadcasters must do in other countries.

Doing this, of course, would accomplish many of the worthy and much-needed goals of campaign finance reform.

But since when do broadcasters do anything for the public good?

Comments

[Uosdwis]

Yeah, you know the broadcasters rake in all that campaign money every election year (Senators have to raise 20K a DAY!), but they can't just make these converters FREE so that their CUSTOMERS can continue to WATCH them and pay their way.

[LintLass]

Goes all the way back to what Reagan did to the FCC. Media deregulation and such.

[FearlessFreep]

Commissioner Mark Fowler called TV "a toaster with pictures." In fact, it's a utility, like the electric company or the gas works, and requires regulation to match.

[lglglg]

The FCC made a hash of early television: not providing enough channels in the mistaken belief that it would take decades for television to catch on (only 12 for the whole nation!); instituting a "freeze" very soon after the first TV allocations; then adding SEVENTY UHF channels that ultimately were more than the market could sustain! Now they've allowed numerous VHF stations to park on their old channels, instead of making EVERY DTV outlert UHF. That's because they only allow channels 14 through 36 and 38 through 51. For certain technical reasons you can't have a channel 37, but why couldn't the Feds have stretched the channel numbers to 60? (Odd fact: not only is there no channel 37, there is no Mozart Symphony number 37 either...they just skip from 36, the "Linz" to 38, the "Prague".)

[progressivegreg]

You probably know more about this than I. I'm a retired radio broadcaster, but to my view the broadcasters having both spectums is actually more expensive for them to operate what with two transmitters eating power, plus the temporary antenna placement and lowered power on both spectrums. I just don't see how any of that benefits them financially or logistically. Plus the digital will give broadcaster the opportunity to run, not just one channel, but multiple channels. As for paying for the spectum, I agree with you, but having both for the time being, to me, has been a negative on their bottom lines.

[GTRich2004]

I agree, Feb's pushback wasn't the choice of the broadcasters. That blame lies at the feet of Washington.

[Ameriki]

Money is important, of course, but more important is the almost total control of all forms of communication by a handful of private interests.