These are not great days for the LPTV industry as the incentive auction looms in the ever-nearing future. They are not sunny by any stretch of the imagination, ranging from uncertain at best and dark at worst. LPTV Spectrum Rights Coalition Director Mike Gravino pulls no punches as he calls his constituents into the battle to see LPTV though the auction and into the future.
A Speech to the LPTV Community
By Mike Gravino, Director, LPTV Spectrum Rights Coalition
I would say to this industry, as I said to those who have joined this Coalition: “I have nothing to offer but ideas, toil, tears and sweat.”
Meanwhile, the industry should prepare itself for hard and heavy tidings. I have only to add that nothing which may happen in this battle can in any way relieve us of our duty to defend our legacy businesses to which we have vowed ourselves; nor should it destroy our confidence in our power to make our way, as on former occasions in our history, through new laws, rule makings, and through grief to the ultimate defeat of our enemies.
Turning once again, and this time more generally, to the question of displacement, I would observe that there has never been a period in all these long decades of which we boast when an absolute guarantee against displacement, still less against serious rule makings, could have been given to our businesses. In the days of Wiley, of which I was speaking just now, the same wind which would have carried his ideas across the national mall, and might have driven away the blockading competing conglomerates. There was always the chance, and it is that chance which has excited and befooled the imaginations of many spectrum tyrants. Many are the tales that are told.
We are assured that novel methods will be adopted, and when we see the originality of malice, the ingenuity of aggression, which our enemy displays, we may certainly prepare ourselves for every kind of novel stratagem and every kind of brutal and treacherous maneuver. I think that no idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered and viewed with a searching, but at the same time, I hope, with a steady eye. We must never forget the solid assurances of our Part 74 rules, and those which belong to Congress and the Courts, if they can be locally exercised.
I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our spectrum neighborhood, to ride out the storm of the “volunatry” incentive auction, and to outlive the menace of displacement, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of your Coalition, your Alliance, and your Association – every licensee and permittee of them. That is the will of this Coalition and the industry. LPTV and TV translators, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native spectrum, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.
Even though large tracts of low-band spectrum and many old and famous channels have fallen or may fall into the grip of the wireless industry and all the odious apparatus of their desire to have no public interest obligations, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight from 51-38, we shall fight on from 36-27, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the courts, we shall defend our spectrum usage rights, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight in the large urban DMA, we shall fight in the rural mountains and plains, we shall fight in the suburbs and in the islands, we shall fight in our cities of license; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this industry or a large part of it were subjugated and displaced, then our Class-A cousins beyond the harm of displacement, armed and guarded by their windfall profits from the incentive auction, would carry on the struggle, until, in good time, the new LPTV industry, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
Paraphrased liberally from Winston Churchill’s “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” which is a common title given to a famous speech he delivered to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom on 4 June 1940, at the gravest and darkest hours of WWII.
