FCC Blocks All Plans in 22 Markets to End Analog TV Tuesday
The FCC blocked plans by all stations in 22 markets that sought to end analog broadcasts Tuesday (CD Feb 12 p6), commission data show. The FCC rejected the early-transition plans of a total of 123 stations in 44 metropolitan areas. A public notice released by the commission at 11 p.m. Wednesday said early analog cutoffs by the stations would pose a “significant risk of substantial public harm” because over- the-air viewers could lose access to local news, public affairs programming and emergency information. The stations have until 6 p.m. Friday to show that they'll follow eight specified steps to educate viewers about DTV, or show special circumstances, in order to go all-digital Tuesday.
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The commission approved requests by 368 stations to stop analog service then. No PBS affiliate or noncommercial station was turned down, our review of FCC data found. Public stations got FCC permission to go forward without asking to be excluded from those whose plans were culled from an earlier list, said a spokeswoman for the Association of Public Television Stations. NAB representatives didn’t reply to messages seeking comment by presstime.
“We considered the presence of major networks and their affiliates critical to ensuring that viewers have access to local news and public affairs available over the air because the major network affiliates are the primary source” of such programming, the public notice said.
The FCC made many decisions by market, a spokesman said. “Some determinations were made by city, not by market, because sometimes a market-wide determination would gloss over the real public interest impact of early analog termination,” he added. The commission will release on Friday a public notice listing which stations whose plans were blocked have agreed to take additional educational measures so they can go forward, he said.
Several broadcast lawyers said blocked clients were trying to figure out whether they could meet the FCC’s requirements to go ahead with analog cutoffs. The commission may have excluded nonprofit stations because of their financial situation, said lawyer David Oxenford. If that’s the case, it was incongruous for the FCC to block plans of some satellite stations to go digital when the broadcasters whose signal they retransmit can stop analog service Tuesday, he said. Clients are trying to “figure out if they really want to convert, what they can do to let the commission allow them to convert,” said Oxenford. “Clients caught in the web may not be happy” and “may disagree with the FCC, but I don’t sense that they fail to understand the FCC’s reasoning,” said lawyer Peter Tannenwald. “Most clients understand that the FCC and Congress fear adverse political reaction if too many people are left without TV service.”
Broadcast lawyer Harry Cole said, “The commission’s public notice makes it very clear that the FCC is picking on the net affiliates rather than indies” or noncommercial outlets because the commission thinks the stations in the first group are the primary news source. “The commission presumably thinks that its best bet for assuring the continued availability of such programming in analog is to put the burden on the net affiliates either to continue such programming or to make sure somebody else is taking care of it.”
Most of the stations seeking to stop analog service Tuesday in 17 other markets can’t unless they agree to have a neighboring station air educational information about DTV in analog for 60 more days, including in Spanish, among other steps, our review found. Most of the stations that can’t stop analog service on the 17th are in smaller markets: Almost 70 percent in markets smaller than No. 99. Half the major network affiliates in those smaller markets had their plans blocked, our review found. Among publicly traded broadcast chains that identified themselves to the FCC, the biggest loser was Gray TV, with 14 stations blocked. Nexstar had four stations blocked, Fisher three, and two each for Hearst-Argyle, Media General and Saga. Privately held Newport, which bought TV stations from Clear Channel, had six stations whose plans were blocked. LIN, McGraw-Hill and Young each had plans blocked for a single station.
Stations were scrambling Thursday to quickly figure out if they could afford to meet the new requirements, said attorney Wade Hargrove. “On the one hand, everybody understands the policy underlying this. On the other hand, a lot of these stations have relied on what the government told them was the law, and that you could go forward on the 17th without commission authority, absent of a change of your digital channel.” WABG-TV Greenwood-Greenville, Miss., among those blocked, is weighing its options, said General Manager Sherry Nelson. “We are examining the eight measures required by the commission to see if we can comply. If we can’t, we will be forced to keep analog on until June.”
The requirement to run Spanish-language emergency alerts seemed novel, several lawyers said. “That seems to be a new dimension of regulation -- that programming must be transmitted in two languages,” Hargrove said. “Why did the commission single out a mandatory requirement for Spanish to the exclusion of any language in addition to English?”