PUBCASTERS SEEK TO LEVERAGE ‘SENTIMENT’ ON LOCAL CONTROL OF MEDIA

Public broadcasters hadn’t taken a position on the ownership cap issue because it directly concerned the commercial media, Lawson said, “but have tried to make the point that for those who want to preserve locally controlled media, don’t forget about public broadcasting. Because in many communities we are the last of the locally controlled electronics media.”

Lawson said public broadcasters had begun grass-roots action and were building coalitions with like-minded groups and “reaching out” to consumer groups to channel the sentiment against media consolidation to further their policy agenda. “We need the FCC, Congress and the White House to help in some fairly defined and limited ways,” he said: “They could do a lot more to ensure the survival and growth of locally controlled public broadcasting in the digital age.” For example, Lawson said, without requiring cable multicast carriage for public TV’s digital signals, “it’s going to be very hard for stations to raise the money for new content streams and services made possible by digital.” Public TV also needs some interim analog/digital carriage, he said: “We know that the [digital] transition may never get done unless we get cable carriage of our digital signals.”

Congress and the Administration also need to understand that public broadcasters’ digital conversion needs didn’t end with the May 1 deadline, Lawson said: “Our stations still have to meet FCC requirements for simulcasting and signal replication.” PTV stations also need matching funds to help buy new cameras and other equipment to produce local programming, “which is at the heart of what everyone wants as part of the whole media consolidation debate,” he said. Public broadcasters are using the “heightened awareness” of the media consolidation issue to “step up our lobbying activity with members of Congress and we will certainly be honing our arguments as we make the round at the FCC on our issues.” Local PTV stations also are being advised on grass- roots advocacy and outreach to the local press, he said.

Coalition building is another “important area” that public broadcasters hasn’t been pursuing “as aggressively in the past as we could have,” Lawson said. “This is mainly a resource issue, we do want to reach out to public interest groups.” Public broadcasters also see potential partnership with public safety agencies and others interested in putting up the analog TV spectrum, he said: “Our challenge is to draw a connection for those potential coalition partners between support for our policy agenda and the analog spectrum eventually vacated by the broadcasters.” Conversations are continuing with a number of public safety oriented organizations, he said, with the focus lately on the potential of DTV datacasting for emergency communications: “But we hope we can expand those conversations to include the importance of public broadcasting policy agenda in making analog TV spectrum available for safety purposes.”

Lawson urged public interest and consumer groups to channel some of their concerns about preservation of local commercial media into preservation of local noncommercial media. In the past, he pointed out, those groups had done just the opposite. He said that rather than support the “relief” provided by the FCC in allowing public TV stations to raise funds through their ad-supported ancillary and supplementary services, these groups brought a legal challenge to parts of the FCC’s decision. Public broadcasters are maintaining contact with public interest groups, he said, and “this probably is the time to reach out to them.”

“The interesting thing is that they might be the last bastion of localism if they did localism,” said Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America (CFA). He said his group had been talking with public broadcasters and “I expect there to be many more conversations.” However, public interest groups have a “series of counter demands” for public broadcasters, he said. Saying there were 2 ways in which public broadcasting must play an important role in “democratic discourse” in the Digital Age, Cooper said public broadcasting should be a public interest conduit. “So, one of their digital channels ought to be dedicated entirely to for local public interest.”

Public interest groups also think it’s “extremely important” that PBS be a truly independent voice, Cooper said: “Boy, it would have been nice if PBS had behaved like the BBC during the [Iraq] war. There was clearly a public interest role but they really didn’t play that role.” On opposition to public TV stations using ad-supported ancillary and supplementary services to raise revenue, he said the concern was that there was someone who would do news stories that were in the public interest and “never ask what does it do to my commercial interest.”

Lawson said cable’s refusal to carry nonduplicative 2nd and 3rd PTV stations in a market had become “really a life- and-death proposition” for many stations. “When a station is providing adult training or K-12 education, we think it is really important that that be carried. And that’s really where the negotiations [for digital carriage with cable operators] are broken down.”

Cable accused public broadcasters of using the same old arguments on carriage issues and finding “different ways to talk about them.” An NCTA spokesman said of APTS’s cable carriage requirements: “There is nothing new that they are asking for.” He said cable operators were carrying all PTV stations on analog and the “loss of PTV stations is not at risk during the digital transition.” In more than 35 markets, he said, cable operators were carrying the digital signals of PTV stations, which was a “total voluntary commitment.”

Asked about public broadcasters’ complaint that there had been no more than 2 national digital carriage agreements with cable operators in the last 3 years, the spokesman said it was “a bit ironic” that public TV was looking for a “one- size-fits-all” national agreement when it was the content of the local station that should determine carriage agreements. Cable operators were negotiating with local public TV stations for carriage “where there is compelling content for them to be added,” he said. Although cable had invested a “significant” amount in network upgrades, the spokesman said, there was a limited amount of bandwidth and channel capacity available. “Requiring… must-carry of every broadcast and public television station would significantly deplete that available bandwidth and require operators to drop other popular and viable cable networks.”