Latest Privitization Scheme -- Local TV Frequencies
The company that owns USA Today bought 23 TV stations in 2013, then dumped all the debt from its newspaper chain onto a spinoff company called Tegna which is now one of the biggest local broadcast companies in the USA. Meanwhile, this new company is proposing to all the unions at its TV stations what Tegna calls "non exclusive jurisdiction language." This would allow them to have other people report and photograph the news, effectively busting out their unions.
Those labor organizations have formed a coalition to resist this attack on professionalism. In researching that employer, the unions discovered the most likely reason why USA Today bought those stations -- to speculate on the bandwidth, rather than to broadcast. In 2012, Congress passed legislation obliging the FCC to set up a Spectrum Auction, allowing every local TV station license holder in the country to sell all or part of its assigned frequency to the highest bidder.
The rationale for this is that the low frequency of the TV spectrum travels farther and penetrates walls better than the higher frequency bandwidth used by cell phones and other digital technologies. The old analog method of broadcast used far more bandwidth than is necessary today, and it makes sense for Congress to direct the FCC to arrange a method for reallocating this public resource.
But it makes no sense to just sell the bandwidth to the highest bidder. And it is a travesty for the proceeds of this sale of a public resource to go to the temporary holder of a broadcast license. It is our air, not theirs.
Here is a video from a Town Hall meeting in Seattle last Wednesday night that addressed this issue. It is long, but I think you will find it interesting.
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