‘Covert’ TV Station Consolidation Eyed by Nonprofits in FCC Quadrennial Review

Commissioner Michael Copps said the FCC must do more to “strengthen community media,” something he’s long championed and said he'll work on after leaving the agency later this year. “How about dealing promptly with the issues and petitions you bring us,” he asked of 2009 petitions including from the alliance. “How about finally determining that carriage of PEG channels on the basic tier is a public interest obligation that cable companies need to live up to,” Copps asked. “And if a company insists on all of the benefits of cable without being called so, we should insist that if they walk like a duck and talk like a duck, they ought to be called a cable duck, too.” If the Media Bureau acts on the petitions against AT&T, it likely would recommend they be dismissed (CD Sept 22/10 p6). “This has been sitting for too long at the commission while PEG channels get moved to digital Siberia,” Copps said.

Congressional efforts to bar municipalities from taxing wireless service are misguided, said Mitsi Hererra of Montgomery County, Md. Barring such taxes would mean “you can’t raise taxes at local level to fund local initiatives” and so “you're dead in the water” for a community to differentiate itself from elsewhere by local telecom and other initiatives, she said. “We're losing on this front.” Outlawing “discriminatory cellphone taxes … sounds great,” she said of pending bills in the House and Senate, but there’s no pending legislation to get rid of federal phone taxes, higher on most wireless bills than local levies, Hererra said. Under the last extension of the Internet Tax Freedom Act, which she called “the winner for best name” among bills, municipalities can’t charge ISPs taxes for using rights of way to sell broadband.

The FCC should let multiple members of a household get Universal Service Fund programs by using federally subsidized Lifeline and Link-Up wireline and wireless service, Hererra and others said. “Unfortunately, it seems that the commission was rather quick to assert early on that … households are only eligible for one coupon for service,” said Policy Director Ben Lennett of the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation, where the event was held. Hererra called it “astounding in its stupidity” to give a home low-cost broadband or low-cost phone service, but not both.

On news and operations-sharing deals short of actual M&A, they mean viewers of multiple stations get the same or similar news, said Advocacy Manager Qres Ephraim of the Media & Democracy Coalition. “What you basically get with these types of simulcasts is really nice pieces on the human interest” and “who got shot up the night before,” she said of the resulting news programming: “But it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter” of what’s happening in a community. Much local broadcast programming is “weather, sports and traffic,” said Hererra. “And there’s more to local community information than weather, sports and traffic.” Viewers “want that news and information,” and surveys show it, “but the question is how to get beyond that,” she said. An NAB spokesman had no comment.

"Covert consolidation” by broadcasters, who can’t fully combine stations in the same market under FCC rules, “is really a step backwards, and something we are going to be confronting” in the review, said Policy Counsel Corie Wright of Free Press. “It’s incumbent on the FCC to recognize this phenomenon, and to put some standards in place,” she said in response to our question. Two or more stations sharing a news helicopter is OK, “but when you take two separate stations with two separate newsrooms” and “you're basically putting duplicative news on the air, that’s not a very good use of the spectrum,” Wright continued: Those news deals and boosting media diversity are “signature issues” for public-interest groups.

Wright cautioned attendees to not become complacent or “exhausted” from the current review, just as broadcast consolidation foe Copps retiring from the agency. “It is incumbent on you to maintain your energy, because it does still matter, and it may matter even more than ever,” she said. Public access channels should use their programming to spread the word of an upcoming FCC window for nonprofits, which could include PEGs, to seek low-power FM stations in urban areas, said Policy Director Brandy Doyle of LPFM advocate Prometheus Radio Project. While the commission’s goal of opening such a window next summer “is an optimistic” time line, “when they do open up a filing window,” time will be short to seek LPFM stations, so PEG channels ought to get out the word now, she said: “Think about how you can use the channel you already have to spread the word” about the “one-time opportunity to build community media infrastructure."

"Boil issues” down to the local level in explaining complex telecom subjects to legislators and policymakers, Hererra said in response to our question. “Leave the lawyers and let them write the briefs and the filings, but don’t let them write your handouts” for meetings in Washington, she said. “You find a way to make whatever it is you're talking about in some understandable chunk,” during informal conversations, “and you find a way to do that with your member of Congress,” she said. “Localism and diversity are two easy concepts” to get across that community media addresses, said Executive Director Sean McLaughlin of Access Humbolt, a California PEG programmer. It’s sometimes easier for constituents to get word across to their member of Congress than for an advocacy group, said Doyle. PEG proponents who want Congress to pass the Community Access Preservation Act (HR-1746) might want to seek its inclusion in another bill seen likely to pass, Hererra recommended. Recent Congresses have been “more amenable to adding to another bill” than passing new ones, and this session “is not amenable to doing anything,” she said. Given the act is revenue-neutral, she said Congress may be “amenable to adding [it] to a bill.”