Communities Excluded, the Public Deluded in FCC's Secret Giveaway of Thousands of TV Channels

[Joanne98]

Early next year, 1700 holders of TV station licenses holders will reap an unearned bonus. Each and every one will receive multiple new digital TV channels without the bother of new licensing, without public scrutiny, and with next to no accountability for their use of this scarce public resource. In this exclusive interview which aired on WRFG-FM Atlanta earlier this month, Ms. Carrie Biggs-Adams, a broadcast engineer and staff person for the Communications Workers of America describes how the FCC and commercial broadcasters deluded and excluded the public from the table as they engineered this colossal theft, worth an estimated $73 billion, and outlines a public response that may result in hundreds of new digital channels going to noncommercial broadcasters, to unions, to community organizations and local and minority entrepreneurs.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

BD: Most of us have heard that there's going to be a transition from analog to digital TV next year. What we've heard is that some people are going to need to purchase special receivers or converters or whatever to adapt their old TV sets to the new technology and we've also heard there is a government grant available for this purpose. This is pretty much all we hear about the transition from analog to digital TV if we rely on the mainstream media to tell us the story. But is that really all there is?

Well, here's the rest of it. The FCC has decided that on February 18, 2009 every holder of a broadcast TV station license is going to get a Valentine's Day present. They are going to get four brand new digital TV frequencies, the practical equivalent of four brand new digital TV station licenses for every one of the old analog TV station licenses they had before. These new TV frequencies are going to come with the same obligations to serve the public that their old analog licenses did, which is to say, no obligations at all, or next to no enforceable public service obligations that we can find. PEG, or Public, Educational and Government TV gets nothing. Your local libraries, high schools, colleges, public health services, community organizations, they get nothing. Entrepreneurs who'd like to get on TV, to bring local talent before local audiences, they don't get new channels either. Local churches, not your national megachurches but local ministries in our local communities, they also get nothing, and although the broadcast spectrum is legally public property, these new stations ONLY go to those who already have them.

Carrie Biggs-Adams is a career broadcast engineer who is now a staff rep for the Communications Workers of America. She's going to explain to us what the issues really are around the analog to digital TV conversion, and how the transition from analog to digital TV is being used by broadcasters to privatize the public airwaves, and to permanently lock the people out of any say over what are supposedly public airwaves.

Sorry about that long-winded introduction there. So, Ms. Adams --- so what if these TV guys get four licenses (or four stations) for every one they have now? What's that got to do with us?

CBA: Well, it changes a little bit how we watch TV, and of course if we want to affect the airwaves and touch the licensing process it's a big change. As I'm sure you know, now when a license is up for renewal, we can challenge it. We haven't been fairly successful at this lately, because under the Bush administration the renewal times are every eight years, but at least you can dust it up a little bit, say “how are you serving the public, how are you serving the community?” But instead of just that one broadcaster on that one license in that one town, and of course they're owned by corporations that are miles away, we're going to have that one broadcaster owning four channels, not just the one channel of the TV that comes into your home over the air.

BD: But these station owners, they've got deep pockets --- they're professionals, after all, and we're not. They've got plenty of useful, compelling, stimulating and enlightening content to put on all these new channels, don't they?

"instead of twenty analog TV channels to watch with nothing... we'll have eighty channels with nothing to watch..."

http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=666&Itemid=1

We're going to have to NATIONALIZE THE MEDIA!