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Single stream carriage: The public interest argument

On the other hand, Democrats Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein made it abundantly clear that they would have happily imposed multicast must carry on cable operators if they has first gotten assurances from broadcasters, and preferable to that, statutory requirements for those same broadcasters to use the added programming capacity in the public interest. The issue is under consideration at the FCC, but both said that it should have been completed before advancing to the must carry issue. Copps described it as, "Ready, fire, aim." Adelstein in particular expressed frustration in his attempts to bring broadcasters to the table. That failure had consequences, he said, and the obvious big consequence was the loss of the Democrats' votes. Adelstein explains (as excerpted from his written remarks):

"It's been somewhat agonizing to reach the decision I'm voting to approve today. Neither the timing nor the conclusion is ideal. I tried unsuccessfully to work both within the Commission and with the broadcasting industry to steer a different path, one premised upon guarantees for the public interest. But the Commission has thus far failed to address the public interest proceedings. So, in many ways, this decision is the unfortunate result of neglect, during the past two years that I so strongly pressed for the public interest."

..."The Alliance for Better Campaigns reports that local TV stations took in $1.6 billion in political advertising from the 2004 elections. Yet Martin Kaplan of the Annenberg School for Communications and the Norman Lear Center this week filed a stunning report that more than 90% of news broadcasts for the month before Election Day in 2004 contained no stories at all about any local candidate races. Of those election coverage stories that aired, only one-third focused on actual issues, as opposed to campaign strategy and the horse race. Eight times more coverage was devoted to stories about accidental injuries than to coverage of all local races combined.

"And this was after Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain, Chairman Powell and I all stood together at a press conference and put broadcasters on notice that we would be watching the 2004 coverage, and that we expected broadcasters to do better job than they had in past elections. The broadcasting industry may dispute these findings, yet the industry fails to provide its own comprehensive and systemic studies, despite my request that they do so. Absent industry studies, I will continue to rely on the few good studies that we do have."

After mentioning incidents involving Sinclair, PAX, CBS and Pappas, he said, "Increasingly, it seems we're in an era where ownership and ideology shape what viewers see and hear over their public airwaves. An exclusive federal license to use the public airwaves ought to carry a higher level of civic responsibility and accountability. Broadcast licensing should serve the civic needs of a democracy by preserving the freedom of an 'uninhibited marketplace of ideas' to serve the common good. Instead, if broadcasters use their exclusive federal licenses to promote an ideology or political agenda, they put their own private beliefs ahead of the needs of a democratic society.

"A broadcasting license should do more than line the pocketbooks of the broadcaster. I'm concerned with reports of the rising level of paid programming on the public airwaves. A 2003 study by the Alliance for Better Campaigns found that community public affairs programming accounts for less than 1/2 of 1 percent of local TV programming nationwide - that compares to 14.4 percent for paid programming. Even Paxson, which so strongly advocates multicasting must-carry, boasts that paid programming represented 41% of PAX TV's 2003 revenue. This bears heavily on the underlying policy issue of multicasting - should public policy reward those broadcasters who sell the public airwaves with full multicast cable carriage?

"NAB's outright hostility to the localism inquiry raised real questions for me about how broadcasters will choose to fill the extra digital programming capacity. NAB admits that many stations have dropped local newscasts, without discussing the effect this is having on the station's stewardship in those communities. NAB sees little connection between broadcast localism and national play lists and voice-tracking technology, oblivious to the loss of localism from these tactics. NAB relies upon a study showing that syndicated programming costs less than news production. So without strong public interest obligations, how can the Commission, let alone the viewing public, be assured that the extra digital channels will add to localism and diversity? Without concrete public interest obligations, there are no protections against non-local or paid programming content filling up the entire extra capacity. Without some modicum of balance, the government could be multiplying an ideological agenda five-fold. Without assurances of localism, the extra broadcast program streams could merely be the same type of 24-hour national feed that are found on cable systems. Worse, the government could theoretically be mandating carriage of 24-hour a day infomercials. I'm not suggesting this would happen, but the mere possibility gives me enormous pause.

..."The tragedy of this is that a well-reasoned multicasting carriage requirement could be designed to serve the interests of the public in promoting localism and diversity. Of course, recognizing the tremendous value of localism, one would expect - - and I will demand - - that the cable industry carry all such programming voluntarily without hesitation or discrimination. The Act, after all, already identifies as a purpose that 'cable communications provide and are encouraged to provide the widest possible diversity of information sources and services to the public.'"


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