For NAB, there’s no other way to see the move than as a blow, and it’s one from which the organization must now pick itself up, dust itself off and regroup for next steps.

In this Talking TV conversation, Curtis LeGeyt, NAB’s president and CEO, says he’s “tremendously frustrated” with the FCC’s decision, and that the group is still weighing the next legal steps it can take to put broadcasters on a more level footing with its unregulated competitors.

LeGeyt also lays out NAB’s priorities for the year, which include an April conference that continues to expand its tent with CES-like ambitions for content creators from all media platforms to find a home.

Episode transcript below, edited for clarity.

Michael Depp: Happy New Year and welcome to our first 2024 edition of Talking TV. I’m Michael Depp, the editor of TVNewsCheck, and today I am with Curtis LeGeyt, the president and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters. We’re going to be talking about that very unhappy holiday gift from the FCC to the broadcast industry, as well as the NAB’s priorities for TV broadcasters this year. We’ll be right back with that conversation.

Happy New Year, Curtis LeGeyt, and welcome to Talking TV.

Curtis LeGeyt: Great to see you, Michael. How are you? Happy New Year.

Thanks for joining me so soon in the new year. Curtis, the FCC gave broadcasters a very unwelcome Christmas present when it reaffirmed and then even tightened its network and TV station ownership limits. This was obviously a big blow, and it comes despite your lobbying efforts. So, what happens next? What’s your next move?

Well, as you point out, you know that the order from the FCC came out right before — or immediately during — the holiday week. And so, we are still spending the time going through the final item. But suffice it to say, we are very, very disappointed, and I’m confident that there are policymakers in Washington, D.C., especially on Capitol Hill, who are going to be disappointed as well.

I think there is significant awareness across Washington of the challenges facing local newsrooms across the country. We have been working with members on Capitol Hill for years on legislative efforts to level the playing field with big tech. You know, we are competing, both television and radio, in an environment where we’re competing for audience and advertising dollars with players all across the media landscape. Yet the FCC’s ownership rules are premised on the idea that broadcasters only compete against other broadcasters.

So, it’s tremendously disappointing that after sitting on this item — and let’s dwell on the fact that this is the 2018 Quadrennial Review — after sitting on this item for so many years that the FCC not only would have left the current rules intact, but in some ways use this opportunity to re-regulate in a way that is going to have a detrimental impact on smaller television markets. So, we’re tremendously frustrated.

Is your best hope here ultimately getting a Republican in the White House?

Well, I wouldn’t say that. There are people on both sides of the aisle — Democrats and Republicans — who are tremendously invested in ensuring that there is a viable business model for local newsrooms. If you look at the media landscape over the past decade, broadcasters are growing our newsrooms. We are investing in local communities and filling the void that has been created by the collapse of the local newspaper industry.

And so, I think members of Congress on both sides of the aisle see that. I have every belief that whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican administration, there is a real awareness of the need for local broadcasters to be able to compete. And in some cases, having increased scale is going to be a part of that.

So, we’re going to make our arguments at both the FCC, at the administration and the White House, regardless of which party is in power. But, you know, we are tremendously disappointed that the current FCC can’t see what I think is obvious even at the holiday dinner table when I talk to my mother or father, that the way that audiences are consuming our content has changed dramatically, yet the FCC’s rules haven’t kept up with it.

Well, preserving localism is ostensibly, for the Democrats on the FCC, that’s their prerogative here, and obviously the station owners are extremely concerned that this has exactly the opposite effect, that it’s going to be corrosive and damaging to local newsrooms. To your knowledge, is there any research about the impact that a lack of consolidation would have on local news production?

So, look, I think the newspaper industry speaks for itself. And what I’m focused on is ensuring that broadcasters have the ability, when audiences are cord cutting, to ensure viable revenue streams. We know that the major tech players, Facebook and Google, have absolutely eaten up the marketplace for digital advertising. And we see that audiences are fleeing the traditional ecosystem.

And in light of that, how do broadcasters compete, not go the way of the newspaper industry, without increasing where they choose to do it some scale, both in the local markets and in the national markets?

I think it is very, very difficult to justify how tightening the ownership rules is going to enable broadcasters to achieve the scale, to invest in the type of local journalism that our audiences have come to expect, as well as to innovate. So that’s really where we are focused right now, advocating for greater scale.

You know, we’re really heartened by the fact that looking up on Capitol Hill, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which is legislation that would enable broadcasters to gain some scale when we’re negotiating with the tech platforms for our content when it’s accessed online. That passed the Senate Judiciary Committee last year and demonstrates, to your question of Republican versus Democrat, we can work with both sides of the aisle.

There are significant Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill who are behind that legislation, which aims in a different way to level the playing field with big tech. We wish the FCC would take an honest look at the marketplace in the same way that our friends on Capitol Hill have.

Well, so to that end, do we need a study or studies to quantify the real potential damage now wrought by this decision? And if we do, who would best execute that?

Well, we have put plenty of evidence in the record as to the state of the local broadcast marketplace and example after example where scale in local markets has resulted in increased investment in local journalism. So, the record, in our view, speaks for itself.

We are certainly examining our legal options, as are individual companies throughout the broadcast industry. But I would expect that there will be legal challenges brought to this order. And our hope is that the record will speak for itself in justifying that these rules no longer represent their stated objectives of the Communications Act.

Well, moving past this, which is sort of like saying: “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” I wonder what else is on the NAB’s agenda this year? What are you prioritizing?

Absolutely. Well, first and foremost is the further growth of the NAB Show. You know, we are just thrilled with the way that the show has bounced back. We’ve now had two shows coming out of the pandemic and the fact that we had 65,000 people in Las Vegas last year, another 12,000 people in New York. We’re obviously building a digital platform to connect our NAB community the other 358 days of the year where they’re not in Las Vegas and they’re not in New York.

We’re gonna be building some additional opportunities to come together around that. I think it demonstrates that with all of this disruption that we are talking about here, that our business leaders and the technology companies that really enable us to create content, distribute it, monetize it, they’ve got real reason to be in person together. And so, we are thrilled with what lies ahead. You know, we’re three months out now from the 2024 show in Vegas. Expect that to be an even larger experience, new innovative experiences on the show floor. So, we’re excited for that.

You know, on the advocacy front, we are going to continue the deployment of ATSC 3.0. The FCC took a huge step last year in its Future of Television initiative, which the NAB has been asked to lead, and we are doing that. Really, this agency putting its imprimatur through that initiative on the fact that this transition needs to go from where it is right now, where you’ve got roughly 60% of the country with access to an ATSC 3.0 signal, to a full nationwide deployment.

This is very, very complicated. You know, we are not the wireless industry where any one individual company can just decide to upgrade. This requires an entire industry rowing in the same direction with the cooperation of the set manufacturers and the consumer groups, as well as our partners on the pay TV side, and I think you’re going to see real continued progress thanks to NAB’s leadership in that regard.

Just to jump in on that one, are we talking there about the task force that [FCC] Chair Jessica Rosenworcel talked about at last year’s NAB Show?

We are. Yes, so immediately following the NAB Show that task force was initiated. You know, there are three different working groups within that task force, each of which has held several meetings and will be issuing a report back to the FCC on the status of any number of issues relating to this deployment.

But I think the importance of this is rather than trying to get to a nationwide transition through just comment filing at the FCC on an issue specific basis, what that initiative enables us to do is really come together and talk about what are the technological hurdles, how do we get through them, what is the policy need to look like in a post 3.0 landscape?

And how do we ensure that no consumers are left behind? Broadcasters are absolutely vested in making sure that every consumer that wants to access a free over-the-air signal has the ability to do it, and they’re going to have an even more enhanced set of programing and a better experience through 3.0.

So, this initiative is a huge part of our agenda for 2024, as is, you know, further progress on ensuring that when our content is used, whether it’s by the large tech platforms or through the emerging generative AI technologies that are relying on news content to fuel their systems and their benefits to consumers and businesses, that local broadcasters are fairly compensated for the use of our content.

So, we’ve got a full plate here. You touched on the Quadrennial Review and the work that we need to do there to ensure a level playing field for broadcasters, But we’ve got a full agenda on Capitol Hill as well as it relates to our TV membership.

Let me just circle back to the shows for a second. In April. I should mention, of course, that TVNewsCheck is a conference partner with our Programing Everywhere event for April 14th there, which we’re very much looking forward to bringing back. Register now.

I wonder — your expectations seem to … I mean the show is bouncing back from the pandemic. Can you ever scale those 100,000-plus attendee heights again? Is that possible anymore?

I think it is possible. The response — and this is across the trade show industry — but I think the demonstrated bounce back of trade shows following the pandemic illustrates that you know, in spite of our increasingly online and digitally connected world, there is a unique value proposition to being together in person, especially when it comes to innovations.

And so, there’s no doubt in my mind that this model of bringing folks together, whether it’s predominantly in Las Vegas or spread across a number of different, more geographically centered events, that there is a demand for it.

We are still trying to make a determination on how we best cater to the NAB audience on an ongoing basis. But I think there is no doubt that given all of the evolution happening in media, you know, in some ways this industry, much in the same way that, you know, the consumer electronics industry became the nexus for, you know, a whole bunch of ancillary players, whether you’re talking about health care or auto, to convene and talk about what innovation meant for those spaces.

I think the NAB Show provides a real opportunity as content production is happening not just at NBC, CBS, Disney, Fox, but instead it’s happening, you know, at major streaming services, but also, you know, in the living room, a place where you can convene and learn about the latest technologies in content creation, the latest trends.

It has broad appeal, it has cross-sector appeal, and we’re going to continue to expand that. So, I’m not sure if the 100,000 will necessarily be simply in Las Vegas, but I think spread across the full NAB portfolio that we plan to grow over the next several years, we see real opportunities to cater to the space.

It sounds like you have a kind of CES-style vision for the thing becoming more expansive then, in that way.

Yeah, I just think that right now we do a great job of servicing broadcasters. You know, this show was created by broadcasters, has really fostered innovation in broadcast, but the reality of this show over the last decade in its growth is to the larger media landscape. And as you know, that landscape is only becoming more complicated, it’s only becoming more significant.

There are such real dramatic questions about some of the business models that are out there in media right now. And the NAB Show is going to be the place where business leaders can explore all of it, where technologists can come together. We’re really excited.

And it sounds like you’re still pretty firmly behind the NAB New York show as well, that that’s fixed on the calendar. I know it is for this year, obviously going ahead. But in the long term, do you see that show as having longevity?

I do see it as having longevity because, you know, what it allows is for those companies who have demoed particular products out in Las Vegas, it allows for them to create a more hands-on experience, a practical one in New York. It also provides us access to a very, very different audience. Yes, just geographically it’s on a different coast. But I think beyond that, the access to Madison Avenue to Wall Street opens up opportunities for our industry that we can’t just necessarily get in Las Vegas. So, there’s a lot of real potential for how we continue to build out NAB New York.

Do you see other regional shows in the mix potentially as well?

Well, I think we’ve got to continue to evaluate where those needs are. But I certainly think, you know, there is major content creation happening in emerging markets across the country. That is something that we can certainly capitalize on. You know, we are continuing to look overseas as to what opportunities might exist there. This is about expanding the NAB Show community.

And, you know, we’re not looking to create redundant experiences where we recapture the same audiences in different places. It’s about expanding our footprint and I think there’s real opportunities to do it, both by increasing our geographic diversity, but also by offering something that’s maybe a little different, more specific than what you can get at a huge show in Las Vegas.

One last thing I want to ask you: The vMVPD issue was a bruising one for broadcasters last year, with both the affiliates and the networks launching their separate respective lobbying efforts over negotiating rights. What is the NAB’s role in this? Can you serve as a mediator in this dispute?

Well, listen, I’m tremendously disappointed that the FCC hasn’t acted to refresh the record in the vMVPD proceeding. Now, this goes back to the points we were discussing with regard to the Quadrennial Review. The world around local broadcasters has changed dramatically over the last two decades, and yet the FCC pretends it is the status quo, and audiences have dramatically changed the way they’re accessing broadcast content.

Broadcasters are competing with large tech companies for market share, for advertising dollar. Yet these rules are premised on a 1990s and 2000-era media landscape. So, as it relates to vMVPD, we’re simply asking the FCC to take a look at the changes in the way that consumers are accessing broadcast content increasingly through these over-the-top streaming services. What impact is that having on local broadcast? We’ve asked them to refresh the record.

We obviously have support on Capitol Hill for that. You know, 21 Senate Democrats, including the chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, Maria Cantwell, have written to Chair Rosenworcel and asked her to refresh the record in this proceeding, and we’re waiting on a response there. So, I’m tremendously frustrated.

At the same time, the relationship between the networks and the affiliates is a very, very important partnership, NAB is going to help to facilitate that partnership, that we have an unbeatable combination when the networks and the affiliates are aligned within our big tent producing, you know, must have sports journalism, national and local combined with the most-watched programing. And that is how we compete in a media landscape with Apple, Amazon and I’m going to continue to urge my networks and my affiliates to invest in that partnership.

It’s not good for anyone when mom and dad are fighting all the time, is it?

That is certainly one way to put it. I’m grateful for the service that both the affiliates and the networks are providing to communities across this country. I think those ingredients are tremendously important in a world in which we’re just overrun by tech misinformation.

Well, Curtis LeGeyt, you’ve got a busy year ahead of you, an important year for yourself and the NAB. So, thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate it.

All right, Michael, thank you so much for the time.

And thanks to all of you for watching and listening. You can catch past episodes of Talking TV at TVNewsCheck.com and on our YouTube channel as well as an audio version of the podcast available most places you get your podcasts. We are back most Fridays with a new episode. Thanks for watching this one and see you next time.

The post Talking TV: NAB’s LeGeyt ‘Very Disappointed’ In FCC’s Ownership Decision appeared first on TV News Check.

Harry Jessell

It’s 2024 … except at the FCC where it’s still 1964 and regulating broadcasting is all the rage.

Drawing on the prevailing belief of that time that broadcasting was too powerful and concentrated not to be constrained and managed by the federal government, the agency — by a vote of its three-person Democratic majority — last week bucked the decades-long trend of loosening TV regs by affirming and tightening its Top-Four TV duopoly rule.

The rule says that broadcasters can’t own and operate more than one ABC, CBS, Fox or NBC affiliate in a market. In recent years, with the tacit blessing of the FCC staff, broadcasters have been able to circumvent the rule, mostly in 100-plus markets, by airing one or more stations on an LPTV station or multicast channel.

No more. The rule stays and the “loophole” is closed, the FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel and other FCC Dems proclaimed. Existing so-called virtual duopolies will be grandfathered, but they can’t be sold to another broadcaster without official FCC dispensation, which will cause all kinds of M&A complications.

The FCC says it will continue to consider Top-Four duopolies on a case-by-case basis, but we learned that’s a tease earlier this year when the FCC killed a proposed combo of two affils in Fargo, N.D., through one of Rosenworcel’s favorite tactics, bureaucratic indifference. Like the parties involved, I could see nothing wrong with the deal when I plugged in the FCC’s own criteria for granting them.

The ruling is a blow to broadcasters who see ownership of multiple affiliates as an effective way of achieving news economies of scale and preserving, and sometimes expanding, local news in the market.

It’s also a loss for the NAB, which argued for relief. Cable and satellite operators, organized under the banner of the American TV Alliance, pushed long and hard for keeping the lid on Top-Four duopolies, contending they gave broadcasters undue leverage in retrans negotiations that would result in higher fees for cable subs.

“We applaud the FCC’s efforts to help consumers by closing loopholes in its broadcast ownership rules,” the ATVA said in a statement following the vote. “For too long, these loopholes have allowed broadcasters to control distribution of two, three, or even all four major networks in markets throughout the country…. Today’s action promises some long-awaited relief for consumers and their pocketbooks.”

The FCC order swallows the ATVA argument whole, saying the tougher duopoly rule advances its long-standing goal of ensuring robust competition not only in retrans negotiations, but also in the local advertising market.

“Promoting competition among local television stations prevents local broadcasters from demanding higher retransmission consent fees and charging higher rates for local businesses seeking to purchase advertising time on local stations, costs that may be passed on to consumers,” the order says.

I concede that the ATVA had the higher ground in the battle since rising retrans fees no doubt put upward pressure on what consumers (i.e., constituents) have to pay for cable and satellite service. However, NAB should be able to fight uphill and win. The scores of cable networks that also demand fees from operators also drive up consumer prices.

In addition to preserving competition, the FCC also cites its long-standing goals of ensuring local programming (localism) and diversity of viewpoints or voices (separately owned stations) in justifying the duopoly rule. On paper, these are laudable, but they no longer make sense in today’s media ecosystem where there are literally hundreds of TV channels vying for attention and dollars, not to mention traditional media like newspapers as well as other relative newcomers like social media.

The FCC’s misguided obsession with broadcasters’ competitive clout may be detrimental to localism. Broadcasters need retrans dollars, as many as they can get, if they are to maintain and expand their news and offer other local programming. As I have argued here many times before, the FCC needs to get out of the way and let the market set the retrans fees.

And, of course, broadcasters also need advertising dollars to fuel their newsrooms. Is it really the job of the FCC to structure markets so that auto dealers, PI lawyers and home improvement outfits don’t pay too much for spots and pass the cost on to their customers and clients?

For the record, TV stations’ share of the local ad market shouldn’t sound alarms. According to BIA Advisory Services’ forecast, stations will reap just 13% of the $175.6 billion in local advertising spending this year, a presidential election year in which stations’ share is greater than in other years.

Intense competition, by the way, is not necessarily the path to better journalism. In fact, less of it can enhance it, producing fat profits and extra resources for newsrooms. I would say the Golden Age of Newspapers stretched from 1970 to the early 2000s when single papers emerged to dominate markets and did great things. The Times in Los Angeles, the Tribune in Chicago, the Globe in Boston, the Post in Washington all come to mind.

Newspaper publishing offers another lesson. Hundreds have withered or died over the past two decades from the onslaught of digital media. TV stations have been suffering from the same heat. That they have been holding their own so far does not mean they will continue to do so. Think what would happen if political media buyers discover a better way to reach likely voters.

Yes, the FCC is right to be concerned about the loss of a voice in the market, which is the natural consequence of duopolies, but losing a voice is better than losing an entire news operation because of regulatory hobbles.

Some markets simply can’t sustain three or four independent news operations anymore. Last spring, Sinclair shut down its local news operations in five small markets. (Here in Pittsburgh, DMA 28, where I live, Sinclair doesn’t even bother with producing its own news, although it carries newscasts of Cox’s crosstown WPXI.)

Broadcasters may be able to overturn the FCC action in the courts, but that is a long, costly and laborious process with no guarantees. Their best hope now for relief is the return of a Republican chairperson, one with faith in the marketplace and a belief that regulation is not the default, but the last resort.

Both FCC Republicans, Brendan Carr and Nathan Simington, voted against the measure. “The FCC has every reason to update this outdated set of broadcast radio and television rules,” said Carr in his dissenting statement. “The law compels us to do so. The facts tell us to do so. And the public interest in promoting local news and information counsel in favor of doing so. Yet the rules will remain in place — impervious to those compelling forces.”

I should caution that a Republican FCC might come with a lot of baggage, namely Donald Trump. He is no friend of news media that criticize him, and the FCC is a perfect tool to punish any outlet under its jurisdiction that does.

Carr, a likely FCC chairman in a Trump second term, is just the guy to wield that tool on Trump’s behalf. In May 2020, after Twitter tagged one of his posts as possibly misleading, Trump urged the FCC to look into regulating social media just as it used to regulate broadcasting via the Fairness Doctrine. Carr enthusiastically embraced the idea, First Amendment be damned. As far as I know, he is still a member of the Trump politicult.

The FCC needs a major attitude adjustment. It has to stop thinking of TV as indestructible and dominating players that must be controlled by wise heads in Washington, lest the broadcasters turn their newsroom over to AI-driven avatars, crush local economies with incessant spot increases and spawn a cable-deprived underclass.

If the FCC is truly interested in broadcast localism, the FCC needs to get its head out of ’60s and into the ’20s. I can suggest a few ways: give stations the right to negotiate directly with vMVPDs rather than having to rely on the sticky-fingered networks; facilitate ATSC 3.0 where it can; and, most important, lighten up, don’t tighten up, on the duopoly rule and other anachronistic structural regulations.

Harry A. Jessell is editor at large of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted here. You can read earlier columns here.

The post Hey FCC, It’s Not The 1960s Anymore appeared first on TV News Check.

Hank Price

In a ruling that would be more at home in the 1960s than the third decade of the 21st century, the FCC last week reaffirmed its commitment to long out-of-date regulations that threaten the long-term viability of local television service.

Specifically, the FCC slammed the door on the idea of combining any two ABC, CBS, Fox or NBC affiliations in a single market. Adding insult to injury, the FCC broadened the prohibition to include secondary channels and low-power TV stations.

Pretending that America still lives in the era of LPs and 45s and console radios, the FCC’s three Democratic commissioners proclaimed that musty, typewritten rules formulated in the days before word processors are still valid because all is well with local television station competition.

One can’t help but think of Lt. Frank Drebin from the Police Squad movies standing in front of a raging fire yelling into a microphone: “Nothing to see here! Please disperse!”

Never mind the fact that consumers now spend more time viewing streaming content than watching network television.

Never mind the fact that network owners have gutted their primetime television schedules to feed their insatiable streaming platforms.

Never mind the fact that Google, Facebook and now Amazon, as well as dozens of other national players, are sucking revenue from local television markets at a record pace.

Never mind the fact that local television news viewing continues to decline, due in part to a massive oversupply.

And perhaps most importantly, never mind the fact that none of local television’s new competitors are regulated.

None of this seems to matter to the FCC. Instead, and this is hard to believe, the commission actually said combining any two networks would “result in the remaining networks paying less attention to viewer demand for innovative, high-quality programming.”

The FCC also claims that keeping the current rules “increases the bargaining power of local broadcast affiliates and enables them to influence Big Four broadcast network programming decisions in ways that better serve the interests of their local communities.”

What innovative, high-quality programming is the FCC talking about? What local station influence on network programming? It has been a long time since any network expressed interest in what local general managers thought about network programming. Quite the opposite is true.

As for innovative programming, all of that is at the station or group level these days, not at the networks.

The FCC’s decision is hard to understand because it reaches illogical conclusions that fly in the face of reality. It’s as if the FCC believes nothing in the world of local media has changed since 1980. Do these commissioners own smartphones? Do their cars have cruise control and airbags?

Not content with making a specious argument, FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel even added a red herring by saying: “No entity can own all the television stations in a single market.”

To my knowledge, no group owner has suggested there should only be one owner per market. There is a small market where one company is affiliated with all four networks, but that is an outlier and not the norm.

All stations want is reasonable consolidation that would allow fewer, but stronger, stations to compete against each other. A market that now has five or six separately owned stations might end up with three or four.

Some station consolidation is essential because the current business model is unsustainable. Continuing threats to advertising revenue and retransmission payments, combined with an explosion of competitors, means the alternative to consolidation will be the eventual demise of weaker players, leading to a last-man-standing scenario. In other words, chaos.

Strengthening and ensuring the viability of over-the-air television is critical to the well-being of our nation. At a time when the FCC should be encouraging innovation, it is instead throwing up roadblocks from a long-past era.

The current FCC majority is entrenched in the past. Let’s hope either Congress, or a more enlightened future commission, is willing to take a more constructive approach to today’s broadcast issues than simply saying “no” to the future.

Hank Price spent 30 years leading television stations for Hearst, CBS and Gannett while concurrently building a career in executive education. He is the author of Leading Local Television and two other books.

The post FCC Gives Broadcasters A Lump Of Coal For The New Year appeared first on TV News Check.

In this Talking TV conversation, TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp and Editor at Large Harry Jessell take a wide-ranging look at the year just wrapping up and the one ahead, and what’s on the line for broadcasters as it comes.

Episode transcript below, edited for clarity.

Michael Depp: We’ve come to the end of a pretty volatile year for broadcasters, and it might fairly be said, an annus horribilis for us all. So, it’s probably a good time to take stock of some of the major events that have faced broadcasters in 2023 and look ahead to what is most likely to impact the industry in 2024.

I’m Michael Depp, editor of TVNewsCheck, and this is Talking TV, our weekly video podcast. This week, I’m joined by Harry Jessell, our beloved editor at large, and we’re going to talk about the health of the industry generally as it goes into the next year, the hope for regulatory relief, the prospects being ushered in by generative AI, 2024 election coverage and much, much more. We will be right back with that year-end conversation.

Harry Jessell: Good to see you, Michael. How are you?

It’s good to see you. I’m well, thanks. And it’s good to see you. You are the only person I’d want to wrap the year up with and look ahead to…

I think I’m the only person qualified to do that.

The only man standing on this planet who can do it. Exactly. Exactly. So, let’s play a little ghosts of Christmas past, and then ghost of Christmas future. And let’s start with the past, the year behind us. A lot of things going on. One of those things that might tell us something to sum up the year’s health of the industry, are stock prices.

Well, yeah, I thought, you know, there’s a lot of ways to measure an industry and we have some big public companies, so I thought I’d take a look at the stock prices and see how we did this year. First of all, the Dow is up 10%. The S&P was up 20%. So, it must have been a good year for the TV stocks. No, they were all down: 3%, 7%, 5%, 3%. Nexstar took a big hit, 32 points [Ed. note: Since this was recorded, Nexstar’s stock rebounded to 155 on Thursday]. But it was a high-flier. It started the year 174 and is down to 142, which is sort of a shame because Nexstar, the group, I think is really trying to do some things. And maybe we can talk about that a little bit later on with the CW and the NewsNation.

So, not a great year if you believe Wall Street. But I will say they’re doing better than radio. There’s a couple radio groups now that are selling for under a dollar.

Yeah, I don’t know, I mean, radio is a pretty low bar relatively speaking, but we have had a lot of headwinds this year. I mean, you know, just generally, advertising, the spot ad market was really challenged for a lot of this year. It wasn’t a political year. Of course, they’re looking at one next year and have a lot of hope with regards to a rebound there.

Well yeah, you know, that’s the nature of this business. And I think the number was that we got from Steve Passwaiter was $10 billion, of which broadcasters will get the lion’s share. So, that’s going to be a big hit for broadcasters and positive hit. They have that to look forward to as well as the challenge of covering those elections.

Yes, which we will come to. Let’s talk a little bit about the M&A year that wasn’t, in many ways, starting with Tegna.

Well, yeah. Well, this business is so heavily consolidated now that there’s not much room for mergers and acquisitions anymore. And the one big deal was cratered by the FCC and Jessica Rosenworcel, she torpedoed that deal crushing Soo Kim’s opportunity to make another big score in broadcasting and I think may have chased off some private equity money and hedge funds that might have been looking at broadcasting and their big cash flows that come, and she sort of sent a signal that you’re not wanted here in broadcasting. She’s a traditional Democrat, isn’t looking for more consolidation in this industry. So, that was sort of a negative for the industry, I think, overall.

Yeah, absolutely. But then we also have perhaps ABC on the sales block.

Well, yes, that was the story that never happened. In July, Bob Iger decides… I think the comment was like, his linear channels may not be core to the business, which a lot of people took as a sign that he was ready to divest ABC and ESPN maybe and his minor or smaller cable networks. And everybody got excited for a while. I saw numbers for ABC at $5 billion up. But you know, just a couple of weeks ago he sort of walks it back and says, you know, really, I was just really gassing, never mind, we believe in the future of linear TV. Maybe that means he does believe in linear TV. Maybe he just stirred up no interest in those networks.

Well, Byron Allen shot his hand up and Nexstar seemed to be sniffing around.

Nextstar, I think is definitely, and Byron is always sticking his hand up in the air. He’s an ambitious man. One of these days he’s going to make a big score, I think.

This would be a big one for him.

So, that never materialized. Maybe let’s put a positive spin on that. Let’s say this is Disney recognizing once again that linear TV is core, is important for maybe creating shows that they can sell downstream. So, let’s take it as a positive.

And of course, people at ABC are pretty nervous, though. I don’t think anybody feels like they’re standing on terra firma right now.

Well, probably not a good idea if you’re in the broadcasting business.

Harry, there was another big story this year with Disney and Charter.

Well, I was just going to say, the other sort of endorsement of the linear TV idea was that Disney and Charter, after coming to loggerheads in September or late August over a new carriage deal. It looked like that would go bad. It looked like Charter might walk away, but they didn’t. They were able to cut a deal for the ABC stations and more, and ESPN, and they got Monday Night Football up there.

And so, all was well, that was sort of a short-lived crisis. And had they not done that deal, that may have had repercussions for other broadcasters trying to cut new retrans deals. And so, I think for the time being, it’s secure, the idea the retrans will continue to come in. We have another year or two anyway of business as normal.

Sigh of relief.

Sigh of relief.

Another issue this year that was substantial, still unfolding really, is around the FCC and the virtual MVPDs, and that kind of fostered a bit of a schism inside of the broadcast world.

Well, yeah. Network versus affiliate the old, they’ve always been at odds, more prominently at some times than at others. But the real story there is, again, Rosenworcel has decided that she will not save broadcasters and allow them to deal directly with the virtual MVPDs, which are becoming a big part of the ecosystem now. That they will have to work through the networks, and when the networks make those deals with the virtual MVPDs, the affiliates always end up on the short end. So, that was a blow.

And it’s like Rosenworcel, like a lot of people, they say they love localism, but she doesn’t do a whole lot to help localism by supporting TV stations. I think she thinks she’s doing good by disallowing duopolies. I saw that was in the news again this week. NAB is making another run to persuade the FCC to allow network affiliates in the same market to own each other, you know, common ownership of two network affiliates. She’s not a fan of that. She’s turned down deals like that or rejected deals like that. That’s something she could do. You know, giving affiliates the right to negotiate directly with the MVPDs would have been nice…

Doesn’t roll off the tongue, does it, Harry?

Now we need another term. Can we come up with another term for that?

Yeah, I’ll work on that.

But what is clear, what is crystal clear, is she wants to help, maybe. But she doesn’t quite know how to. We’ll put it like that.

Well, one of the things I suppose you could say that that she did do to help, at least nominally, was a task force that was announced on ATSC 3.0, back in April, I believe it was, at the NAB Show, to kind of kick start that along, get that moving a little bit further. Doesn’t seem to have been a great year for NextGen TV, though, has it?

Well, it continues to bump along. Every so often you’ll see that they have announced another market, but I have yet to see a real plan for generating some revenue, creating a business either through enhanced television or through datacasting. I think the fact that LG, one of the big TV manufacturers, decided to take a pause in the marketing of NextGen sets was not good news.

Under litigation. So, it wasn’t maybe a voluntary pause, but nevertheless.

Yeah.

Just to say they were the biggest boosters in the OEM world for this technology. They were the ones kind of sticking their neck out the furthest. There was a lot of ambivalence with a lot of other set manufacturers.

Well, we’ll see what happens at the Consumer Electronics Show. But, you know, frankly, I don’t think that’s… I think it’s more of a datacasting business. I think that’s the way it’s going to go. And in even in that space, there’s another competitive transmission system out there. Got 5G, you know, uses the same transmission system they’re using for the phones, there’s a faction of the LPTV industry that’s sort of pushing this idea. So, then the ATSC proponents have to deal with that now, that somebody else is after that spectrum.

They’ve definitely thrown some cold water on that. But I do know that that some of the other the non-Sinclair broadcasters are trying some experiments with datacasting that they’ve kind of been keeping a lid on. I think some companies are just trying to manage expectations around this that it’s not going to be a panacea.

But you know, what’s interesting, when I talk to general managers, these are some of the people who are the most John the Baptist about the potential. They really do believe something is coming that will be transformative, mainly in terms of like addressable advertising in many ways. And it’s odd because that sort of dropped out of the national conversation. Certainly, it’s not leading the salient characteristics of ATSC 3.0 when we’re talking about it in a broader sense. So, they still believe, even if the faith has perhaps been challenged.

Well, as Mark Aitken is always telling me, keep the faith.

OK, well, there it is. So Nexstar, we touched on that before and they’ve had an interesting year with their national network endeavors. One of them being the CW, which underwent a pretty significant reboot this year.

Well, my Nexstar or my CW story is: I was at a New Jersey beach in September wondering how I was going to watch the West Virginia/Pitt football game, and I was surprised to find it on the CW. I guess they have an ACC package. I should have known that, but they do, and so I was able to watch that game sitting in a beach resort in New Jersey. I guess out of Philadelphia, it was. But I think that’s the right strategy, I mean they’re really heavy into sports. They did a wrestling thing also.

So, yeah, I think that’s a wise way to go. I hope they can make it. I know they’re investing heavily in it. At least Nexstar has sort of a growth strategy and maybe that’s why their stock is trading so much higher than their peers. Also, I listed this the year that Scripps came out and started talking about scooping up some local sports, and we’ve seen some of that.

Yeah, not only Scripps, Gray is on their heels, other groups are getting in there and definitely a lot of sports deals were announced. It wasn’t a plethora, but there was so much flux in that space, and it continues to be really, a lot of the teams in various leagues wanted to develop direct to consumer products for streaming so they can be sure to reach their fans. But they were convinced in many cases that broadcast is a value to them.

You know, it was years ago when I was growing up, you could watch baseball, hockey, basketball on broadcast TV or fairly frequently, boxing. All of that went away, by and large. And so, you know, those were fan recruitment devices. Those are tools for that, and I think they’re seeing the wisdom of that. And so, you get these 30-game packages that are popping up around the country with different teams and they seem to be good deals, or at least the teams are willing to try it out and see how it works.

Well, I hope we see more of them. You seem to have tracked it more closely than I. I’ve seen a few, but I’d like to see, you know, what do I know about sports marketing? But here in Pittsburgh, to do 25 or 30 games on broadcast TV and remind the people that have abandoned, the cord cutters, that we still have baseball here in Pittsburgh seems to me like a no brainer. I’d like to see it. I think it certainly would be a great thing for broadcasters if they could make that not as a loss leader, but as a real source of profit.

Yeah, well, Scripps is certainly the most bullish in that area, but Gray isn’t far behind them. And I think every group is taking this. Sinclair is trying to get back into that game a little bit and do some deals, and I think most groups are at least considering the possibility.

I think if Sinclair never saw another sports program again, they’d be happy.

Well, perhaps.

Their venture into sports has not been a good one so far.

No, but that story isn’t done being written yet.

OK, keep the faith, keep the faith.

That’s right. That’ll be the mantra.

That’s our theme.

Absolutely. And then just lastly, with Nexstar, NewsNation has another year behind it. Now they’ve got a presidential Republican debate that they have hosted. Are they, do you think, moving closer to viability, acceptability, with viewers?

I haven’t looked at the numbers, but I was sitting in a Chinese restaurant, and they could have had any TV station going on. Any TV station, there’s 10,000 of them and they had NewsNation. They must be doing something right. I think having that Republican debate on, which for some odd reason, I’ve been enjoying those debates. You know why? Because they’re talking policy. If they’re talking real policy, they’re talking about fixing things. There’s something normal about them. But I thought, I thought that was sort of a feather in their cap. It gave them a little status. If they were one of the big boys. I think it’s a very polished network.

It is.

No nonsense, very polished. They’ve done a nice job.

That’s Christmas past Let’s look to Christmas future 2024. There are a few things I want to bring up. Just the things that I’m watching and dynamics that will be kind of obviously important for the next year. One of them is the FAST channel phenomenon, which has become wildly, explosively popular with broadcasters. All of them, I think, at this point realize or already have FAST channels that they’re putting in various places, on the MVPDs, on the apps that are sponsored by the OEMs. Most of them have a strategy of ubiquity and putting them in as many places as possible. It’s a sort of easy-to-understand, intuitive business. It’s linear TV streaming, simply no VOD menu.

But it is an area that also, interestingly, where there’s a lot of change already happening. It used to be, you buy a smart television, you open up the app with all the FAST channels inside and you’d see a lot of library content stuff that was just kind of thrown at the wall to see what works. We are past that phase now.

We’re in the culling phase and the reorganization, redistribution of where FAST channels sit in those ecosystems. And it’s definitely turning out to be the case that they have to really think about, anybody putting one of these channels out, has to think about programing. It can’t just be some afterthought or just wheels that are running in endless circles that the OEMs and other more prized real estate wants to see original programing. They want to see dynamism, they want to see live. And so, it would seem that every broadcast group right now, needs –  

When you say, OEM, what are we talking about?

The set manufacturers, so the LGs, the Samsungs, anybody’s who’s got… and every TV basically now is a smart TV and it’s starting to come with loads of, you know, hundreds of FAST channels. But if you want to have a good place in that channel lineup, then you’ve got to have good stuff there. So, there can’t be any passivity about the programing. I think we’re going to go into this interesting year of prioritizing that platform and what it can do and just being much more active.

I have to tell you, when I turn on my TV, I look at, you know, I use Roku, when I look at those, you know, I can go down search channels and it’s just the clutter of stuff. And, you know, sometimes you see something that you might think is interesting. You go in there, it’s second-rate stuff. It looks like a lot of clutter.

It’s got a diginet-y kind of quality to it, sometimes in the worst sense of the diginet. But again, that’s you know, that stuff is getting stale. And it was sort of placeholder material in the FAST ecosystem. And now we’re moving into this more, I hate to use the word, but curated kind of sensibility about those channels.

Well, here’s what I want to know is what am I going to do with all these pay streams that I’m paying for I can’t keep paying them for. I think I’ve you know, they’re sort of like barnacles. You go through, I just collect them. I don’t think there’s, I’ve got them all and I got to do something. Can we cut to the consolidation phase?

Bundling. Well, the consolidation phase is happening for sure. But before that we’re going to see the bundling phase. And that word has already been thrown out by a few executives just in the last couple of weeks. It is coming. I think Apple TV and Paramount are talking about bundling and there are others that are under consideration right now. Bundling is going to happen, as people predicted years ago, the a la carte nature of streaming and buying streaming services has become onerously expensive, just on par with what people were paying for their cable bills. And so, what’s the value proposition really there? We’re going to see some culling of the herd. We’re going to see some bundling. There’s just going to be endless volatility in that space. So, you know, keep watching.

I guess the story is that none of these things are particularly profitable right now.

No.

No, they are not.

Well, many of them are. You know, Netflix tends to, by and large, to be pretty successful, but you have to have a massive, massive library. And that bundling is right. Even when you have a big library with lots of good titles, it’s got to be super enormous to really sustain. Of course, having all that programing costs a lot of money. The technology itself costs a ton of money and people don’t realize, they think it all just wafts in the cloud. There are server farms and massive infrastructure costs to running these things. And so, these were not small businesses that were quick to get off the ground and inexpensive. They were enormously expensive.

And then you add in the programing cost, to make the best programing that we’ve ever seen in some ways in the history of television. High cinematic production values, this cost a fortune. And this is all weighing on everybody’s balance sheets right now as we’re going into 2024.

You know, back in the day, it always irritated me that you had to get both HBO and Showtime. And I’m feeling the same way. If I want to get all the stuff that I want to get, I really have to do all those channels and they all have something on them.

You have to work three jobs to pay for it all too.

There’s a couple other things. Well, the major thing to watch, I think, for next year and maybe the most important thing since the advent of the internet — and I’m not even being hyperbolic here — is generative AI and its potential not only to change every part of our life, every industry, it’s going to affect broadcasters and it’s going to affect them imminently.

When I was at the IBC show in Amsterdam back in September, the word every single booth there was repeating like a mantra was the word
“efficiency,” because everyone realized they needed to get more efficiency out of their technologies than they have been getting. They need to lighten the load on people who are working in news, who are overworked. They need to get rid of redundant activities that go on routinely in newsrooms.

And AI, generative AI, has the opportunity to wend into so many facets of news production and lighten the workload, do incredible good potentially toward reducing the kind of redundancies that are out there helping, for instance, with versioning content from multiple platforms, which is a very onerous part of people’s jobs at TV stations as one example. It has so many appeals, and it’s becoming so much more precise, so sharp and so intelligent, it’s machine learning, so it’s always learning from what it’s doing. And its appeal to news producing companies is enormous on many levels. They are also extremely wary of the knock-on effects that it brings with it.

I’m sorry, what kind of effects?

The knock-on effects of, you know, just various things that will happen that as a result of adoption that you have to consider. You know, one of the things, for instance, being the major trust issues that consumers have with all sorts of televison, both local and national television, at this point.

When you’re employing AI at any level of the news process — and it can be applied at every level from news gathering to writing material, editing — all of this stuff can be automated. It can intermediate itself in very minute and very substantive ways that you might consider to be authorial in some ways.

The industry now has to reckon with how do you tell viewers about how you’re using it? If you are, what sort of disclosures do you offer there? And if you do disclose — I just read something today that the viewers want to know when it’s being employed, but they trust you less when you tell them. So, you know, you’ve got a real conundrum, there.

Yeah, really. Are you hip to what happened to Sports Illustrated?

Sports Illustrated, Gannett. I mean, those who have used it compositionally to write stories and yet, mind you, AP has been using it for years in that regard. They have these sort of templatized stories that they use to report earnings for a lot of small companies that allowed them to produce a lot more earnings coverage than they had been doing because they create a written template, and they plug in data points that are sort of scraped with the AI.

They did the same thing for minor league sports and baseball. And we’re talking like five or so years ago. It’s been out there, and they were fully transparent about its use there. Other groups are murkier in the way that they have used it.

Well, SI, which I consider a great journalistic brand. I don’t know what it is lately, I don’t read it. They were making up reporters. I mean, they were using stock photos and putting little blurbs at the end of the story. I mean…

And I still don’t think, as of this moment they have not come completely clean with what happened there. But it does enormous damage to the credibility of the brand. Of course, SI had some damage done, you know, going into this. And I think it’s often groups that are in dire straits, like Gannett, who are using it very liberally. But some TV station groups, look, many of the SVPs of news that I talked to in local station groups have a high, very elevated level of concern about it. They know they have to deal with it. They know it’s kind of fashioning into an arms race where someone is going to start using it and they’re going to get a competitive edge by doing so. So, they can’t just stick their head in the sand about it.

The stage that they are mostly at right now as groups is to form a sort of steering committee or some sort of internal apparatus that can start to assimilate all the information, the developments that are going on around this world — and they are coming daily, fast and thick — to try to get a handle on simply what is the narrative around this technology, how can it be used and what are the pitfalls we need to be aware of?

And there are also industry-wide consortia that are beginning to consolidate around this, around subsets of the AI issue, for instance, content authenticity, and we’ve had some podcasts and other material just this year about this subject.

How do you authenticate stuff because it’s so easy… AI can be weaponized as sort of tool of manipulation of content, and what do you do? How do you discern that? How do you prevent your own content from being in some way altered and misused once it’s out in the wild? And so, there are technologies being developed to watermark things once they’re disseminated, and there’s a sort of manifest that follows it. It’s extremely complicated, and it’s an arms race between the sort of bad actors using AI and the news organizations who want to use it to good effect.

Well, look, let me interrupt you. What would you advise the broadcasters? You say there’s sort of a downside to transparency, Right?

There is.

You can’t be too honest.

Well, so it seems. I mean, there was one report that found that viewers then have a wary eye that they raise around that. But there’s already a handful of news organizations who are wholly creating content with AI, that you can just get rid of reporters altogether.

This is one of the facets that’s going to have to be dealt with, and it does present, it should be really clear, that if companies broadly adopt generative AI into their newsrooms, it doesn’t seem possible that positions won’t be eliminated in the process. And those are positions that require a lot of critical intelligence.

And so, you know, I don’t want to say that producers all need to be worried about their job security per se. But the notion of a gen AI filling the many facets of the producer role is imminent and many other roles. You can have an AI-generated synthetic anchor or an avatar of one of your existing real human anchors, right now.

Well, TVNewsCheck has been sort of on the cutting edge of reporting that they can’t find producers. So, it sounds to me nobody’s going to lose their jobs, they’re just…

Probably not.

This may save stations.

Harry, I have a disclosure for you: You’ve been talking to an AI this whole time. I’m not actually, not actually me. It’s just my avatar. Just kidding. But it’s close. We’re close to that, and so the point is, broadcasters need to lean into this. They need to pay close attention, read everything they can. They should have a point person or group if they don’t have that now already. And these groups, these people are going to have to make some very consequential choices over the next months and year with regards to this technology.

Well, that’s great editorial fodder.

We’re all over it.

You should be.

I just want to bring up one last thing I think that we’re all going to obviously be looking at for next year and deeply concerned about, which is coverage of the 2024 election, because you have a very, very difficult needle to thread, even just looking through the lens of local television stations here where everything is politicized at every single level. You can’t just say, well, we’re local, we’re not national, we don’t have to worry about the same trust issues. They do. Mistrust has widened and it’s deeply impacted local news, and they cannot put their heads in the sand with regards to engaging the deeply polemicized viewerships that they have right now.

Trump is almost certain to be the Republican nominee and Biden the Democratic nominee. And with more and more utterances coming from Trump that are deeply, concerningly anti-democratic in nature, as in threatening the core tenants of the republic, stations have to wrestle with how they present that, that language, its consequences. What we know, in this particular candidacy, is issues that are raised that are very, very serious to the future of U.S. democracy as we have long known it.

They risk in engaging that to any degree utter alienation of Republican voters, for instance, and to abdicate in any way they risk alienating Democratic voters or just generally left-leaning voters who feel that that abdication is a failure of responsibility. And so, on that front, again, they’re going to have to make daily decisions about coverage. And they’ve struggled with this, and they continue to struggle with it about how to contextualize all of this. And how to get out of the horse race to talk about the larger issues that affect the state of the republic right now.

So, those are those are some serious, serious things that they’re going to have to grapple with, as well as the safety of their reporters. I mean, reporters are assaulted in small ways and large ways, much more than people realize in this country. It is a dangerous job. They’re in the crosshairs. People have been whipped up into a kind of frenzy and they feel very, very free about attacking verbally or otherwise or making threats on social media or in person reporters at every level.

And so, every single newsroom is going to have to develop protocols and keep iterating those protocols and have security with their reporters when they’re in situations that could become dangerous and so many more situations can become dangerous now.

OK, here’s a question for you, you want to pontificate, sir. Do broadcasters have a responsibility or are they liable? Because of the nature, I mean they’re going to take all this political advertising in next year, right? A lot of it is provocative, a lot of it is pretty nasty. It can get pretty nasty. Doesn’t that sort of fuel this conflict out there in the real world?

So, you’re sort of warning broadcasters that they’re going to have a tough time covering this election next year. At the same time, they’re sort of whipping up the electorate with just broadcasting those ads. I didn’t use the word responsible because they’re not, because of the way the law is written. They are not liable for a lot of what goes into those ads. Their obligation is they air them pretty much as they receive them. What do you think?

Well, like you said, their responsibilities are somewhat limited. They’re certainly not going to turn down that money. They need it badly. But, you know, it kind of also circles around to a broader media literacy problem that we have in this country where, you know, a lot of viewers conflate everything they see into one big kind of organism.

They don’t make these delineations. We’ve done a terrible job as a country, given how saturated we are with media. We have an electorate which is ill informed in many, many, many cases and conflates a lot of material. Of course, those problems are conflated by some news organizations themselves, particularly on cable, particularly in primetime, where this conflation of opinion and news is just wholly realized at this point.

So, we have that problem to untangle and no immediate solution presenting itself. If I could dictate something to the industry, I would advise trying to weave in media literacy efforts more often into their programing in small and large ways, if they could, to help viewers understand and unpack critically the things with which they are being presented.

And you can do that in all sorts of ways. But right now, this problem does face us immediately. And these are the dynamics that are already well in motion. And so, we’ve got to play the hand that we’ve been dealt.

I think that’s a good answer. Media literacy and broadcasters, I think, should do that. Again, this gets back to transparency. What they’re doing, what’s really happening out there, when the politicians say this, what do they really mean and not?

I don’t think they should stand in judgment just to know that, at the very least, know what the incentives that are driving media understand the economics of the business so viewers can sort of understand why they do some of the things that they do. I think that having a good industry-wide campaign for the industry, for broadcasters to undertake…

At the same moment, it should be clear that a lot of groups have made great leaps forward in just the last couple of years in the way that they’re covering stories, in realizing that they need to build transparency more into the process, what they’re showing viewers and showing them behind the curtain of news production a little bit more than they ever have, trying various creative ways to be more transparent.

And the product is everywhere that you can see of that nature, and there has been great improvement. They are meeting, trying to meet the moment in that sense. So, I’m optimistic that an effect of all of this has been that that most of the major groups have been introspective about their news product, iterating it much more dramatically than they have for decades.

Well, they are still considered the most trusted source of news, so they’ve got to be careful not to lose that.

Yes, exactly. And they know it. Well, I think a good note to leave it on is the prospect of trust and hope springs eternal. Harry, it’s been great talking with you once again and looking back and ahead to 2024. We’ll see you next year.

OK, yes, sir. See you then.

Thank you. And you can watch past episodes of Talking TV, at TVNewsCheck.com, as well as on our YouTube channel. We will be back in the new year with a whole slate of new Talking TV podcasts every Friday and look forward to seeing you then. Have a good new year.

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The rules package, which the commission ratified on Wednesday, would empower the agency to review and investigate instances of discrimination by broadband providers to different communities based on income, race, ethnicity and other protected classes.

The order also provides a framework for the FCC to crack down a range of digital inequities including the disparities in the investment of services for different neighborhoods, as well as the “digital divide,” a term experts use to describe the complete lack of internet access many communities experience due to regional or socioeconomic inequality.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said that Congress required the agency to adopt rules addressing digital discrimination, through bipartisan infrastructure legislation passed at the start of the Biden administration.

“The digital divide puts us at an economic disadvantage as a country and disproportionately affects communities of color, lower-income areas, and rural areas,” Rosenworcel said in a statement to The Associated Press.

“We know broadband is essential infrastructure for modern life, and these rules will bring us one step closer to ensuring everyone has access to the internet, no matter who they are or where they live,” she said.

Poorer, less white neighborhoods were found to have received lower investment in broadband infrastructure and offered worse deals for internet service than comparatively whiter and higher-income areas. That inequity in access “was especially pronounced during the pandemic,” the chairwoman said.

There is no clear standard for tracking inequities in the provision of digital services, though communities impacted by other discriminatory practices such as redlining and rural disinvestment report worse rates of service or outright lack of access. The FCC hopes its new rules will streamline the process for reporting such issues to establish an official record of discrimination going forward.

The rules allow the agency to examine whether an internet service provider knowingly discriminated against a community in how it built, upgraded or maintained internet access, as well provide a framework for determining whether a proposed service plan would create a “discriminatory effect” that couldn’t otherwise be avoided by reasonable steps.

“While the intent of the statute is to apply pressure to internet service providers in order to avert discrimination, it also eases the responsibility of states and localities who are receiving (federal infrastructure) funds to have that same responsibility,” said Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Center for Technology Innovation at The Brookings Institution.

The telecommunications industry has opposed the framework, arguing that the policy would hamper investment in communities by requiring regulations that the industry says are unnecessary. In a statement after Wednesday’s vote, The National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the industry’s main trade association, called the new rules “potentially unlawful.” The group also said the FCC was seeking “expansive new authority over virtually every aspect of the broadband marketplace.”

“Many, if not most, long-standing, uniform business practices could be seen to have differential impacts on consumers with different income levels,” the group said.

Meanwhile, Free Press Action, a digital advocacy group, applauded the new rules and called on the FCC to go further by reclassifying some aspects of broadband to bring about “quick action to bring back the important oversight powers the agency needs to do its job.

During Wednesday’s FCC hearing, Brendan Carr, one of the agency’s commissioners, argued that the new policies opened the agency up to potential litigation and would hamper operations by the telecommunications industry. “It’s not about discrimination. It’s about control,” said Carr, who said that the telecommunications industry had entered a “Faustian bargain” by supporting the bipartisan law and had previously called the framework a “power grab.”

“Ignoring disparate impact would have denied Congress’s directive to this agency. It is simply not plausible that we could prevent and eliminate digital discrimination by solely, solely addressing intentional discrimination,” said fellow commissioner Geoffrey Starks. “The rules we adopt here today are not the end of our work.”

The FCC is also poised to reimplement landmark net neutrality rules that were rescinded under the Trump administration. President Joe Biden has said the investments in the bipartisan infrastructure law are meant to connect every U.S. household to quality internet service by 2030 regardless of income or identity.

“Whatever the FCC does in terms of discipline or punishment, I would hope that the benefit goes to the community being discriminated against in the form of more equitable deployment,” said Christopher Ali, a professor of telecommunications at Pennsylvania State University.

“That’s going to be difficult to order. But we need to make sure that the communities are reaping the benefits of these decisions. I think not just that these companies have been punished,” said Ali, who participated in an FCC diversity and equity working group focused on takeaways from the pandemic.

“It’s unclear at the moment how many complaints would be needed for the FCC to elevate it to an investigatory issue,” Ali said. “So maybe then, that’s where community groups and local organizations are going to become absolutely vital.”

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For more than 20 years, Capitol Airspace Group has provided analytical, strategic and advocacy services to airports, communities, and commercial developers. The company’s core competencies are in the Federal Aviation Administration aeronautical study process including obstruction evaluation and airspace analysis, instrument flight procedure design and optimization, and the Department of Defense mission compatibility evaluation process. Capitol Airspace prides itself on helping airports and developers strike a balance between the desire for economic development and the need to preserve the national airspace system. To date, they have filed more than 100,000 different aeronautical studies with the FAA.

As a division of Capitol Airspace, Cavell Mertz will continue its 34-year tradition of providing quality consulting services to the broadcast and communication industries.

Additionally, Cavell Mertz is expanding Capitol Airspace’s services to the renewable energy sector by providing communication interference studies. These studies will evaluate the potential for wind turbines to interfere with AM and FM radio, television broadcasting and land mobile radio systems.

Existing services and platforms, including FCCInfo.com, will continue to be available.

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The comments are in response to a move by the Media and Democracy Project to deny renewal on the grounds that Fox’s Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch violated the character requirements expected from public trustees granted a broadcast license through commentary and reporting by Fox News that promoted former President Donald Trump’s false claims that he lost the presidency in 2020 because of a rigged election.

In comments filed at the FCC, Councilmember Katherine Gilmore Richardson said: “Revoking their broadcast license would not only damage an important partnership that serves as a link between City Council and the people of Philadelphia, but it would also tear down a long-standing journalistic institution dedicated to the betterment of our city.”

Councilmember Anthony Phillips wrote: “We do our best to inform the public of our commitment to solving the problems that matter to them, but we can’t do it alone. With the help of Fox 29, we are able to bring awareness to our constituents that we remain vigilant in our efforts to keep our community safe.”

And Councilmember Sharon Vaughn added: “I plead with the FCC to do the right thing and renew Fox 29’s broadcast license so that the network can continue to provide the type of community coverage that our city’s most important causes desperately need.”

The support follows similar letters from local elected leaders including U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), former Undersecretary of the Army and former Democratic Congressman Patrick J. Murphy (Pa.); Democratic Pennsylvania State Representative Malcolm Kenyatta, Democratic State Representative Anthony Bellmon, and Camden, N.J., Mayor Victor Carstarphen.

Among those filing in support of revoking the license are Former Republican FCC Chairman Al Sikes; Jamie Kellner, founding Fox Broadcasting president; Preston Padden, former Fox executive and Murdoch lobbyist; Bill Reyner, former counsel to Murdoch/Fox; and Bill Kristol, former editor of conservative, Murdoch-owned The Weekly Standard.

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In the letter, the senators express concern regarding their constituents’ continued ability to access programming from local broadcast television stations on digital streaming platforms. The senators urge the Commission to reexamine its proceeding, first opened in 2014, that solicited comments about whether federal regulations governing pay TV providers such as cable and satellite providers should extend to streaming platforms that offer linear programming.

The letter cites the growth in online video platforms since the proceeding was opened and the impact the ongoing shift to streaming is having on consumers’ access to public safety information and local news.

“In light of these marketplace changes, we urge the commission to examine the video marketplace and seriously consider how it can ensure the viability of local broadcast stations and promote localism,” reads the letter. “As the expert agency, the commission should be developing a record and recommendations to ensure that our regulatory system — which has enabled a thriving locally-focused broadcast system that is the envy of the world — is not undermined by the explosion of new technologies that were not foreseen even a mere decade ago.”

“Broadcasters play a vital role in providing verified and factual information to the public about their local community and events taking place around the world,” said National Association of Broadcasters President-CEO Curtis LeGeyt. “Though the television marketplace has changed dramatically in recent years, viewers still expect and deserve access to their local TV news stations — no matter the platform. We are grateful to Sen. Luján and his Senate colleagues for urging the FCC to examine the impact of streaming on viewer access to local broadcast stations by refreshing the record in the virtual MVPD proceeding. This builds on the leadership and correspondence earlier this year from Chair Cantwell who has also urged the FCC to examine this issue. We are grateful that these senators are committed to ensuring the public’s continued access to the critical local news and public safety information local TV stations provide.”

The letter, led by Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), follows a similar letter from Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) in June urging the FCC to refresh its vMVPD proceeding. In addition to Luján, the letter is signed by Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), Angus King (I-Maine), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

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