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television
Beachfront Property on the Cyber Sea
Does the public deserve a modest rent, as the television
industry occupies this extraordinarily valuable electronic real estate?
By Neil Hickey
Hickey is CJR's editor at large.
You probably haven’t noticed, but digital television – the revolutionary new way of beaming out TV programs – is already here. Scores of the nation’s 1,600 television stations are offering it, although fewer than 50,000 American TV homes out of 98 million have so far bought the $5,000-$12,000 TV sets needed to display those pictures. (That price will plummet as volume grows.) But in the next half-dozen years or so, as the transition from old-fangled analog TV-casting to digital is completed, every TV set in America will be obsolete and consumers will need new ones to enjoy the full benefits of the new Digital Age.
Digital television (DTV) has important implications for journalism and the public’s need for a decent diet of news and public affairs programs. One big feature of DTV – besides its high-definition picture and wide, Cinemascope-shaped screen – is that it allows TV stations to transmit six or eight channels simultaneously instead of just one. That’s called multiplexing, and is the proximate cause for a ripping good donnybrook among broadcasters, consumer activists, legislators, and bureaucrats.
At issue: Should TV stations be obliged to use some of this enormously expanded air time to offer public interest programs: local news around the clock; documentaries and discussions on matters of importance to the community; free time for office-holders and office-seekers; informational and educational shows for kids? TV people are angrily against anyone telling them how to fill those new channels. But many consumer groups insist that broadcasters owe a payback to the public for the right to exploit the public’s own airwaves.
A bit of background: The Telecommunications Act of 1996 gave all commercial and public TV stations in the U.S. – free of charge – an additional channel while they convert from analog transmission (the system that’s been in place since TV began) to digital, which uses the ones and zeroes of computer language. It was a gift (worth $70 billion by some estimates) that triggered the wrath of activists who claimed broadcasters ought to pay for such priceless electronic real estate. (A former Federal Communications Commission chairman, Reed Hundt, called it "beachfront property on the Cyber Sea.") When the transition is complete, broadcasters will return the old analog channel to the government, which will auction it off to interested telecommunications entrepreneurs
Last December, after fifteen months of deliberation, the twenty-two-member Advisory Committee on Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters (the so-called Gore Commission) sent to the White House a thick document ("Charting the Digital Broadcasting Future") that pleased practically nobody. "Marketplace forces do not always deliver important social benefits, such as…adequate attention to public affairs," said the report. "In such circumstances, government can appropriately play a role."
That kind of talk sent shivers through TV people, who regularly assume a defensive crouch at any hint of government meddling in their business. But the objections of TV executives on the commission prevailed, and the final report favored only "minimal regulation," avoiding any suggestion that digital stations be mandated to cover the news, or air any specific public interest programs. So they’re free – pending any FCC or congressional action to the contrary – to use the new channels exclusively for money-making attractions like pay-per-view movies, home shopping, or hoary sitcom reruns.
Democratic Congressman Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts pointed out recently that, while TV stations are avid for the digital channels, they’re not at all sure what to do with them. And they’re waiting to see how – or if – the FCC intends to implement the Gore Commission’s recommendations. Analog broadcasters over the years have borne various obligations, Markey noted: rules about fairness, the endorsing of political candidates, personal attacks on people, children’s programming. The question now, he said, is whether to bring some of those values of the analog era into the digital era. The broadcasters "are moving from the old neighborhood to Malibu." It’s a prodigious increase in the value of their real estate. Since the public extracted a good public interest benefit from the old urban property, he said, "then we should be able to extract a similar or greater benefit from the beachfront property."
Markey, speaking at a symposium at the Library of Congress in Washington sponsored by the Columbia Journalism Review, lamented that many TV stations give scant coverage to the electoral process, the candidates, or the issues. "‘Cover health,’ they’re told [by TV news consultants]. ‘Cover more sports. Cover life-style issues. What’s the hot new diet? The new vacation spot? But don’t cover politics.’" In the new age, suggested the congressman – one in which broadcasting will continue to be more pervasive than cable TV or the Internet – viewers have a right to expect some public good from having ceded to the broadcasters so priceless a natural resource.
At the symposium, other experts offered lively views. Former FCC chairman Newton Minow claimed that only two other countries – Malaysia and Taiwan – don’t provide free air time for candidates. "Unless we change that," he insisted, "the whole democratic process is at risk." It’s a colossal irony, he said, that candidates sell access to something that the public owns – namely the government – by taking campaign contributions from special interests. Then they use that money to buy access to something else all of us own – the airwaves – when they spend millions on TV time for political commercials.
Don’t forget, said Minow, that schools, hospitals, policemen, and firemen wanted that digital spectrum as an important communications tool to improve their service to the public.
But the government said no to all of them – out of fear that the Japanese would grab the lead in digital technology – and, instead, awarded the spectrum, free of charge, to broadcasters, thereby forfeiting the tens of billions of dollars that an auction might have provided the U.S. Treasury.
Even though almost everybody will be affected by the emergence of DTV, the public knows practically nothing about it. And the public isn’t going to know, said Lawrence K. Grossman, former president of PBS and NBC News (another of the cjr symposiasts), because "the story doesn’t get covered in the places where most people get their news, namely on television." Print coverage appears mostly in technical journals and in the business pages of a few big-city newspapers.
Entombed in the Gore Commission report, actually, are some sensible proposals. Examples:
- Digital TV broadcasters who "reap enhanced economic benefits" from broadcasting on multiple channels should pay the government a fee for the privilege, or else make one of their new channels available for local news and public affairs. Or give studio time to community groups that want to ventilate local issues.
- As part of comprehensive campaign finance reform, broadcasters should "commit firmly" to reform the role of television in campaigns. The industry should voluntarily provide five minutes every night, in the thirty days before an election, for federal, state, and local candidates to get their messages out.
- Digital stations ought to make a real effort to ascertain their communities’ needs, and then fulfill them through news, public affairs, children’s, and other programs. And they should be obliged to report to the FCC quarterly on how well, or poorly, they met that requirement.
- Regulators should consider imposing a "pay or play" model, under which broadcasters would have zero public interest obligations, but would pay a small share of their gross revenues (2 percent, perhaps), with the money going to public TV and other telecommunications entities that create worthwhile shows.
More than nine months after the elaborate, detailed commission document went to the White House it is languishing there, instead of being forwarded to the FCC for implementation. Vice President Gore, its initiator, is busy running for the presidency. Most members of Congress are campaigning for reelection. Most broadcasters would be happy if the Gore report were interred and forgotten. For a candidate, this is no time to antagonize the TV station owners and network chieftains who control politicians’ most important gateway to voters.
Meanwhile, digital television – the most sweeping and promising innovation in our broadcast history – continues to roll out across the nation. Will it ever provide the greatest good for the greatest number? Right now, the answer to that is blowin’ in the wind.
