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.

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Harry Jessell

If there are any individuals who ought to be stripped of their ability to be in the news business, they are Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan.

As laid out in extreme detail in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation complaint and discovery, Fox News Channel knowingly embraced, amplified and promoted Trump’s Big Lie that he had been the victim of a giant conspiracy to deny him a second term in 2020.

And the Murdochs, the controlling owners of the channel, did nothing to stop it.

And they let it play out for the worst possible reason — the fear that they would lose Trump loyalists to other pseudo-news networks if they did not tow the Trump line.

In doing so, they undermined trust in American democracy among FNC’s millions of viewers and stoked the anger that fueled the violent storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6. That trust may never be fully repaired.

The Murdochs have suffered for their journalistic transgressions and cowardice. They were forced to settle the Dominion suit that stemmed from FNC producers and commentators allowing Trump surrogates to drag the good name of the voting machine company through the mud and into their deranged election rigging theories.

But, at $787.5 million, with no apology and no admission of its lying and irresponsibly, I’m among those who think the Murdochs and FNC got off light in the settlement and heap on more pain.

That said, I can’t go along with the campaign to punish the Murdochs by stripping away their broadcast licenses, starting with WTXF Philadelphia and presumably eventually the rest of the Fox O&Os.

Leading the charge is a startup media watchdog group called the Media and Democracy Project. It can’t go directly after WTXF for the simple reason that, like most station newsrooms, it steered clear of Trump’s election ravings. So, instead, MDP is relying on a quaint FCC policy that says it can revoke a license of anybody whose character it finds wanting.

MDP is charging that, in failing to responsibly manage FNC coverage of the election aftermath, the Murdochs demonstrated that they are unfit to be broadcasters.

Legally, the lawyers tell me, it’s a stretch. The FCC rarely goes after a license (even more rarely actually revokes one) on character grounds, and when it does it’s because a licensee is guilty of a narrow and long-standing set of wrongdoings.

Among them are lying to the FCC, “news distortion” and repeatedly violating agency rules by the stations themselves. The FCC will also nail you for non-broadcast malfeasance, like a media-related antitrust judgment or a felony conviction of any kind.

MDP hangs its case, in part, on language it dredged up from a 1986 policy statement on character that says the FCC might disqualify license applicants for engaging in “non-broadcast misconduct so egregious as to shock the conscience and evoke almost universal disapprobation.”

In its petition, MDP edited that language, adding a bit about misconduct that “sowed discord” and deleting the part about “universal disapprobation,” which doesn’t really work given that a big chunk of the electorate thinks Trump is a fine fellow and the election was stolen.

It all sounds a little thin.

The more fundamental problem with the MDP initiative is that it would, if taken up by the FCC, perpetuate the second-class First Amendment status of broadcasters that gives the FCC oversight of who can speak via broadcast stations and what they can or cannot say.

In the vast and turbulent media ecosystem of 2023, only broadcasting is subject to second guessing by federal bureaucrats.

Every newspaper, every cable channel, every streaming channel, every podcast, every website, every blog, every social medium enjoys the full extent of First Amendment protections. But, still, broadcasting must continue to labor under a meddlesome regulatory structure whose foundation was laid by Herbert Hoover 100 years ago.

There is a reason the MDP decided not to try to enlist the government in shutting down Murdochs’ Wall Street Journal or the offending FNC itself as penance for the latter’s post-election coverage. There is no office, bureau, agency or department that would have even the foggiest notion of what to do with such a petition.

For the past 40 years, mostly during Republican administrations, the FCC has been slowly extricating itself from content regulation. The big moment came in 1987, when the FCC eliminated the Fairness Doctrine, which empowered the FCC to decide what’s proper and improper to be seen or heard on the airwaves.

Soon after he was appointed FCC chairman by Trump in 2017, Ajit Pai schooled the president after Trump tweeted that, “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!”

“The FCC under my leadership will stand for the First Amendment,” Pai said when prompted to respond to the tweet at a telecom law conference. “Under the law, the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content.”

If that is so (as I believe it is), I would offer this corollary: The FCC does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content of a non-broadcast media outlet simply because they have common ownership. At bottom, that is what this case is all about.

If FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel pursues an investigation into whether the Murdochs are worthy licensees it would stall the ample progress broadcasting has made toward being as free as all the other media with which it is forced to compete. It would also generate a heap of political trouble that may jeopardize the rest of her agenda.

My measure of the chairwoman is that she has way too much sense to go there.

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

The post The Murdochs Are Awful. But Don’t Punish Fox O&Os For It. appeared first on TV News Check.

Harry Jessell

As we learned from the FCC’s sabotage of the Standard-General-Tegna takeover, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel hates big broadcast TV deals.

We now learn she hates little ones, too.

Eighteen months ago, Forum Communications asked the FCC to OK its $24-million purchase of Fox affiliates KVRR Fargo, S.D., and KQDS Duluth, Minn., from Red River Broadcasting.

The deal posed a problem as Forum already owned Fargo’s ABC affiliate, WDAY, and FCC rules prohibit ownership of two top stations (two Big Four affiliates generally speaking) in the same market.

However, the rules also say the FCC will consider such duopolies if the buyer makes a showing that the combo will not unduly damage competition and that it will otherwise serve the “public interest.”

That’s what Forum did, and then it waited and waited and waited for the FCC to grant the waiver and approve the sale or explain why not.

The agency did neither. It just quietly let the parties know that it wasn’t going to act. When the sales contract expired in May, the seller, Red River, had enough. It threw up its hands and walked away.

“The request for a waiver, whether granted or denied, was just not heard, which is the part that really astonishes us,” disappointed Forum VP Joshua Rohrer told me. “Why that is? Your guess is as good as mine.”

It was a bureaucratic trick similar to the one the FCC used in Standard General-Tegna where it stretched out the approval process so long that Standard General’s elaborate financing package unraveled, and it was unable to close.

I see the appeal of the do-nothing, run-out-the-clock method to Rosenworcel. It doesn’t require any staff work or commission vote and it effectively cuts off avenues of appeal.

It also discourages others from applying for waivers, which I suppose is Rosenworcel’s real intent. Even a formal denial would have given some guidance to other buyers and sellers who might want to take a shot at getting a duopoly waiver.

The only guidance here is: Forget about it.

By the way, there was no public opposition to the Fargo deal — no petitions to deny or even informal objections. Of course, the FCC is a political body and so susceptible to political pressure. You never know if someone was sneaking around trying to scuttle the deal.

I asked the FCC for an explanation, and it declined to comment.

This is a good example of bad government. The FCC, albeit during a Republican administration, promised to consider Top-Four waivers, even going so far as to spell out the criteria for winning an approval.

But when a request with each of the criteria carefully addressed comes before it, the agency can’t be bothered with making a proper ruling. The time and expense the parties put into the deal counts for nothing.

This is also another good example of how the Rosenworcel FCC is willing to disrupt the normal course of business for abstract, outdated and questionable notions of diversity of “voices” (owners), competition and localism.

What is especially troubling about the FCC’s mindless adherence to the big-is-bad Democratic orthodoxy is that it has undermined precisely the kind of broadcaster it should be supporting in every which way it can.

Forum Communications is not some Wall Street investment firm like Standard General that is easy to vilify just because it is a Wall Street investment firm.

It is a family-owned company that traces its roots back nearly 150 years and five generations to the founding of The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead newspaper in 1878.

It now comprises several digital and print newspapers throughout the Dakotas and Minneapolis as well as WDAY and the ABC affiliates in the North Dakota communities of Grand Forks, Bismarck and Minot.

And the company is based in Fargo. Back in the day, when the FCC had to pick and choose among competing applicants for licenses, the first thing it looked for was “integration” of local ownership and local management.

The thinking was that if the owners live in the community, they are more likely to operate in the best interest of the community — the people who they are apt to see around town everyday — than some outsider. It makes perfect sense.

How that principle no longer matters at the FCC is baffling.

I can see why the FCC may be wary of granting Top-Four combos because of what happened in Sioux Fall, S.D., just 250 due south of Fargo.

In 2019, in its first and, I believe, only waiver of the rule, the FCC approved Gray Television’s $32.5 million purchase of NBC affiliate KDLT, even though it already owned the market’s ABC affiliate, KSFY. Gray subsequently acquired the Fox affiliation and airs it on a subchannel of KDLT. So, Gray ends up with three of the Big Four in the market.

But Forum isn’t Gray.

Unlike Gray in Sioux Falls, Rohrer said, Forum would have operated its two stations in Fargo independently — that is, with separate brands, news directors, reporters and anchors. “We made a commitment to actually increase the amount of news coming off KVRR over what they are doing today.”

Forum faces tough competition in Fargo. As it happens, Gray operates Fargo’s NBC and CBS affiliates. (The CBS outlet is a low-power station and so isn’t subject to the two-Top-Four ban.)

And, according to our just published Top 30 Station Groups, Gray is the fourth largest group in the nation with annual revenue of $3 billion. You would think the FCC might want to even things up in the market.

In its filing, Forum also argues that its ownership of the Fox outlet would make the market more competitive and local programming more innovative.

It would also result in an increase in local advertising spots in the market as Forum would replace much of the paid advertising and nationally syndicated programming on KRVV with local news. And more spots mean lower ad rates for local advertisers.

As a side note, it is hard to understand why the FCC would strictly enforce the Top-Four rule when it has been easily circumvented with the use of low-power stations and subchannels as Gray has demonstrated in Fargo and Sioux Falls. These dodges have been successfully employed in dozens of markets by others.

So, the Rosenworcel FCC, again in high-handed fashion, has decided what’s best for the good folks of Fargo based on an arbitrary rule that might make some sense in general, but certainly doesn’t in this particular case in Fargo.

In this case, the FCC should have sacrificed a weak third voice in the market to ensure vigorous competition between the two strong remaining voices, one with the resources of a multi-billion-dollar corporation, the other with local goodwill accumulated over a century and a half.

KRVV and KQDS are back on the market (see Kalil & Co.). My guess is that they will eventually go to a station consolidator or speculator with owners far from Fargo and Duluth.

When the FCC routinely approves that deal, perhaps we will get an explanation of why the out-of-market, out-of-touch buyer is superior to Forum. But I wouldn’t count on it.

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

The post FCC Nixes Another Deal With Deafening Silence appeared first on TV News Check.

Harry Jessell

Following last week’s burial of Soo Kim’s $8.6 billion deal to acquire Tegna, I have reviewed the entire matter and come to the conclusion that he was the victim of prejudice and discrimination, but not the kind you might think.

In progressive Democratic circles, hedge funds and private equity firms are seen as evil incarnate — predatory, quick-buck operations that put profits over people. Some of these high-risk, high-reward investment groups have earned their bad reputations.

Alden Global Capital, for one, has been scooping up newspapers and milking them for cash — local journalism be damned — for the past several years. You can read all about them and how they gutted the Chicago Tribune and other papers in The Atlantic.

But just because some hedge/private equity funds are vultures, doesn’t mean they all are [see footnote below]. To think otherwise is prejudice and to act on that prejudice is discrimination.

And I believe that is exactly what FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel did when she ordered a full-blown hearing on the deal last February, knowing it would kill for Kim and his hedge fund, Standard General, the chance of controlling the second largest TV station group (by revenue) in the land. She knew the financing would unravel before the hearing ran its long course.

As I’ve written here before, Standard General may not be the best broadcaster to run the Tegna stations, but it has demonstrated over the past decade that it is a capable and respectable one.

One of the raps against hedge funds is that they want to get in and get out fast. That’s not Standard General’s MO. It got in the business 13 years ago by buying the troubled Young Broadcasting. It then rolled up LIN Media and Meredith and was all set to merge with Meredith when Nexstar swept in with a bigger bid. Not seeing any other immediate opportunities, Kim sold out to Nexstar for $4.6 million in 2017, and soon began looking for a way back in. He began by buying a small group spun off by Sinclair.

The only way that Rosenworcel could justify knocking out Standard General is by looking closely at its stewardship of Young, LIN and Media General. Did it cut newsroom salaries, staff and resources to a point where it affected the quality of the news? Or, did it produce more and better news by imposing greater efficiencies, knocking out the dead wood and making overdue investments in hardware and software?

Rosenworcel doesn’t know. But she could have found out in far less time than the 309-plus days the FCC allowed the Standard General deal to twist in the wind at the commission.

Kim also endured another unexpected form of discrimination. He was penalized or, more accurately, not favored, because he was too successful and because his deal was too big.

Common Cause and other so-called public interest groups have advocated for years for diversity in station ownership — more minorities and more women. It’s been one of the reasons they have fought long and hard against station consolidation. Fewer groups, they figure not without good reason, mean fewer opportunities for minorities that generally don’t have the wherewithal to buy big.

But here comes Soo Kim with a big deal that would put himself — a first-generation Asian American — at the top of a major TV station group, and a woman, the indestructible Deb McDermott, in the position of running the day to day. Upon closing, they would have had control of every minute of programming on 61 stations and would instantly become powerful and influential figures in the industry.

You would think Common Cause et al. would be jumping for joy and declaring victory. But, no, it turns out that Kim and McDermott are not what they had in mind. Their idea of is a bunch of small minority owners rather than one big one. So, they cast their lot with those opposing the deal.

It’s a “good thing” that Kim and McDermott are not barred from owning and managing TV stations, they told the FCC, making sure the agency knows they are on board with the developments in civil rights over the past half century.

“Unfortunately, it is rare for members of either of these groups to be in such a position. But a single large LLP or corporation of the type proposed here is not going to ameliorate or address long-standing inequities produced by structural racism, xenophobia or misogyny — and is not likely to provide additional members of historically excluded groups the opportunity to gain wealth and influence in society,” they said.

In other words, they said, the ascension of a minority to the top rank of broadcasters is meaningless in the long, hard fight for equal opportunity in America. Kim & Co. deserve no diversity points to offset the horrible things the FCC presumes it will do to Tegna should it get hold of it.

Admittedly, Kim fed into the stereotype of rapacious Wall Street hedge funds by submitting for FCC approval a deal that was too clever by half. Its complex financial structure and side deals should have set off alarm bells, and they did.

You can’t blame anti-Big-Media types for crying crossownership when they learned that Apollo Global, the owner of Cox Media, was involved in financing the merger. You can’t blame unions for raising concerns about job cutting. And you can’t blame the cable and satellite operators for protesting the acquisition of a single station that would have given it the ability to boost retrans fees at every Tegna station.

Once triggered, these groups coalesced into a potent opposing force that not only had the ear of Rosenworcel, but also heavy Democratic hitters on Capitol Hill like Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren and Frank Pallone.

Kim did everything he could to placate the critics. He promised no newsroom layoffs, increases in news budgets and hours. He provided reassurance that Apollo’s role in the financing had been structured in a way that would give it no say in running the business. And he agreed to forego those higher retrans rates that he had snuck into the deal.

But it didn’t do any good because Kim could not shake the fact that he is a Wall Street guy and, thus, not to be trusted to do anything he says. Rosenworcel presumed the worst of Kim. There is a word for that.

Having meddled in the primal forces of the marketplace, Rosenworcel now needs to ask herself, “What exactly did I achieve?”

Freed from its deal with Kim, Tegna last week declared that it would accelerate the buy-back of $300 million in stock and increase its dividend 20% starting this fall, part of the “excess capital” it accumulated while the merger deal was in effect. That money goes straight into the pockets of shareholders.

And in its 1Q call with analysts, there was no talk of hiring more reporters or increasing newsroom salaries to improve and expand local journalism.

Publicly traded corporations like Tegna, which now dominate TV broadcasting, serve the same masters as hedge funds and private equity funds do: their investors.

Footnote: A 2022 study by academics at CalTech and New York University Stern studied 56 private equity takeovers of 256 newspapers over the past 20 years and found that mixing newspapers and private equity, like a lot of other things in life, isn’t all good and it isn’t all bad.

Yes, the new owners cut jobs — 7% of the reporters and 10% of the editors — and caused the papers to run slightly more national stories than they had because it’s cheaper to tap a wire service for copy than send a local reporter out on the street. They also discovered a correlation between the decline in local news and a decline in local civic engagement.

But the researchers also found a “bright side.” The private equity bosses imposed efficiencies and made investments in digital distribution that improved the papers long-term “survival prospects.” The new management and investment might help to “turn around and modernize a struggling industry,” they said.

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

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Harry Jessell

For me, the question is not who is George Santos; it’s why is George Santos.

Why is Santos a member in the U.S. House of Representatives from New York’s 3^rd District after making campaign misrepresentations of background, experience and education so fabulous and flimsy that they should have been easily exposed as such by one of the local news outlets in the nation’s largest media market?

The answer is, none did.

Well, one small weekly did.

The North Shore Leader caught on to Santos. It wrote about Santos’ unexplained and unusual campaign funding and skewered Santos in an editorial endorsing his Democratic opponent.

The partisan paper said it preferred a Republican like Santos for the seat, but said he is “so sketchy, unprincipled and bizarre that we cannot…. He boasts like an insecure child — but he’s mostly just a fabulist — a faker.”

Unfortunately, the Leader was too small. Nobody paid any attention to it.

In an interview with PBS NewsHour, Leader Publisher Grant Lally said he was “disappointed” that nobody had picked up on its reporting. “We did send the paper out to a lot of the local organs, a lot of the media.”

Where was Newsday? The 3^rd District covering much of Nassau County is squarely on its turf. It’s supposed to be the paper of record for the western half of Long Island.

The New York Post, The New York Daily News and The Wall Street Journal were also missing in action.

The august New York Times dropped the ball, too, although it partially redeemed itself by exposing Santos as a fraud in a well-reported story that also alleged criminal activity and thrust Santos into a media storm. Published several weeks after the election, it came far too late for the voters of the 3^rd District.

Those voters are the victims here. They had every reason to assume that, if anything was wrong with Santos’ bio, one of their trusted media outlets would have let them know. Now, because Santos is so politically wounded, they are barely represented in Congress.

Overall, the newspapers did a poor job. But they are not my beat. TV stations are.

The so-called flagships of the Big Four broadcast networks — WABC, WCBS, WNBC and WNYW — failed their viewers as badly as the papers and as surely as if they had overlooked a violent nor’easter churning up the coast.

These are not financially strapped small-market stations. These are broadcasting’s richest and finest — or at least ought to be. Their owners are in the front rank of media: Disney, Paramount, Comcast and Fox.

I understand that TV stations have traditionally not done the same kind of local journalism as newspapers do (or did). They have never immersed themselves in the nitty-gritty of political and public affairs reporting. They’re on the street, reporting the fires, crimes and crashes and standing by to keep the citizenry informed when disasters strike.

I also understand stations can’t do it all. Stations in small and medium-size markets have limited resources. Large-market stations would have to cover countless government entities and hundreds of races at the federal, state and local levels.

So, I propose a modest rule that should apply to all markets, not just New York: If a station accept ads for a political race, it must seriously cover it. This seems fair. According to Kantar, all TV stations raked in $4.3 billion in political in the 2021-22 election cycle. Doesn’t it make sense that a portion of that be plowed back into coverage of the biggest and most important races — that is, the ones that buy TV?

By scanning the political ad files of the New York stations, I can see they all benefitted handsomely from many races at all levels, including a dozen or so House races. The Santos campaign didn’t spend on TV, but his Democratic rival Robert Zimmerman did, more than $400,000 on WABC alone. Yet, it couldn’t find the resources to properly check out either candidate.

By “seriously covering” a race, I mean more than some sound bites extracted from a half-hour softball interview with the candidate.

I mean following the candidate around for a week and fact-checking his claims and sizing up his crowds and personal appeal.

I mean looking deeply into the incumbent candidates’ records to see if you can spot any suspicious correlations between his backers and pork he has helped rolled.

I mean not sitting around relying on candidate opposition research — or some tiny weekly newspaper — to come up with “the dirt.”

I mean checking out the candidates’ sources of campaign funds and identifying the people behind any SuperPAC’s that are supporting him or her in TV ads.

I mean doing a profile of the candidate that includes interview with friends, enemies and business associates. (There may not be room on the air for such reporting, but there is online.)

I mean going beyond the issues that tend to dominate campaigns (climate, abortion, policing and the culture war) to figure out who he or she is really representing when in Washington.

I know from my days in Washington that lawmakers align themselves with certain industries and interest groups that their constitutes rarely hear about. Are they carrying water for Big Tech, Big Pharma or, dare I say, Big Media?

And, of course, at the very least, I mean vetting the candidates’ campaign bio from their websites to make sure that they worked in the places they say they did and went to the schools they say they did.  If that’s too much for the news staff, I suggest sending the bios to the HR department. They will check them out in a few hours. Had this been done in the Santos case, he might have been stopped well before the election.

By following this rule — cover races in which candidates buy time — stations might get a great story. In any event, they will have the satisfaction of knowing that they fulfilled their obligation to their viewers, and they may avoid the embarrassment of being the next to get Santosed.

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

The post TV Stations Can’t Miss Another Santos Story In The Offing appeared first on TV News Check.

Harry Jessell

Standard General, controlled by Soo Kim and operated by Deborah McDermott, is not the greatest TV broadcasting company in the land.

But it is most certainly a capable one. Together, Kim and McDermott have built a strong record of running TV stations. Having assembled the financing to make a $8.6-billion deal for Tegna, they should have had the opportunity to close the deal and join the top ranks of broadcasters.

But last week, after mulling the deal for a year, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel unilaterally and wrongly denied the opportunity by ordering the agency’s Media Bureau to hold a formal hearing on charges leveled by critics of the deal. Two broadcast unions alleged the deal would lead to the loss of newsroom jobs, and cable and consumer advocates claimed that it would push up retrans fees and, in turn, cable sububscription fees.

Such a hearing is tantamount to a denial. It’s already been a year since Standard submitted the deal for FCC approval and a hearing would stretch things out another several months. Its highly unlikely Standard would be able keep its complex financial package from unraveling for that long.

The action came even after Standard did all it could to placate the critics, promising not to cut newsroom staff for two years or to use so-called after-acquired retransmission consent contracts to wring fat new retrans fees out of the cable operators.

Such promises should have been unnecessary.

In what industry in what capitalistic country does a merger or acquisition not lead to some job losses? The new guys always thinks they can do the work better, cheaper and faster.

And it does not necessarily follow that higher retrans fees will push up cable bills. Cable operators pay broadcasters $13 billion in retrans fees each year, but they hand over far more than that for a slew of cheesy cable networks that spew reruns and movies cluttered with so many ads as to make them unwatchable and such reality gems as Cheaters, Catfish: The TV Show and Ghost Adventures.

The cable guys could absorb higher retrans fees without raising rates by jettisoning a bunch of those overpriced nets.

I’d also point out, as Standard did to the FCC, that consumers are by no means locked into cable for TV. If they don’t want to pay more for cable, they can opt for the one of the generally cheaper online cable-like offerings such as Fubo and YouTubeTV, or any number of ad-supported or pay streaming channels or buy a broadcast antenna and receive dozens of broadcast channels off air for FREE.

BTW, these after-acquired contracts have been around for a long while now. Why cablers ever agreed to them is beyond comprehension. But the FCC’s job is not to save cable from being snookered by broadcasters in retrans negotiations.

So, as I said, Rosenworcel got promises that would seem to mitigate any concerns, but she decided they were not good enough. I guess Kim and McDermott forgot to pinky swear.

Of course, there was no need for Rosenworcel to rely on promises. If she had wanted, she could have come up with her own language for regulating staff cuts and retrans practices and made them conditions of formal FCC approval. Standard would ignore or circumvent the conditions at the risk of impairing its station licenses.

Now to the irony.

In the hearing-designation order, the FCC explains that its concerns about post-merger news jobs cuts are due to larger concerns about their impact on localism — that is, stations’ tacit obligation to provide local news and public affairs programming.

“Localism, along with competition and diversity, is a longstanding core Commission broadcast policy objective, which together forms the cornerstone of broadcasting,” the order says.

But there is no localism, there is no broadcasting, without retrans. It’s absolutely vital to the financial health of TV stations and all they do.

Don’t believe me? Here’s what the FCC hearing order says: “Over the last decade, the fees obtained from retransmission consent agreements have become an increasingly significant source of revenue for broadcast stations even while revenue from the sale of advertising time has stagnated or declined.

“Such retransmission consent fees have been estimated to account for approximately 40% of broadcast station revenue, with the remainder derived primarily from the sale of advertising.”

Exactly.

Rather than undermining broadcasters’ ability to wrest retrans fees from cable, Rosenworcel and the FCC should be looking at ways of undergirding it as a means of preserving that “cornerstone” of broadcasting — localism.

Bottom line is Rosenworcel’s rationale for interfering with the legitimate working of the marketplace is weak and unjustified. This makes me think that more is going on than can be gleaned from reading FCC filings. In other words, politics.

During the course of the interminable deal review, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote letters to Rosenworcel calling on her to kill the deal for basically the same reasons that showed up in the hearing order.

Those letters could have been prompted by the broadcast unions or the consumer advocates that maintain close ties to the Dems.

The New York Post suggested in January that Bryon Allen, another media entrepreneur with a small group and big ambitions, was pressing Democratic lawmakers to squash the Standard deal so he could make a play for Tegna.

The Post story was prompted by an earlier one in the Hollywood trade Deadline that said Allen hosted a fundraiser at his home that attracted Pelosi and other top Democratic House leaders.

Allen has been trying to make a big score in broadcasting for years. His name comes up whenever a big prize, including Tegna, goes on the block. None would be surprised if he remerges once final words are said over the Standard deal.

I have no complaint about Bryon Allen. I know his station management team and it is as experienced and as able as Standard’s. But, if Allen is lurking about, Rosenworcel should not be using her office to advantage him over another.

Standard is not without Washington allies, not that they will do it any good now. NAB President Curtis LeGeyt said Rosenworcel was out of line for using a hearing designation that effectively cut the two Republican commissioners, Brendan Carr and Nathan Simington, out of the process.

But the two Republicans were not silent. They blasted the hearing order in a joint statement shortly after it was issued: “At this moment, the FCC should be working to encourage more of the investment necessary for these local broadcasters to innovate and thrive. It does the opposite today.”

Well said.

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

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Harry A. Jessell

NAB President Curtis LeGeyt and a contingent of broadcasters made the rounds at the FCC a couple of weeks ago, during which they admitted that the industry’s transition to ATSC 3.0 had “stalled” and that the entire push for the new broadcast standard was “in peril,” according to the required public notification of their visit.

The admission should not come as a surprise to anybody who has been closely following the rollout of 3.0. It’s been more than five years since the FCC authorized use of the standard, and I haven’t found anybody outside the range of this column who knows what it is.

(It might come as a surprise to those who have been reading broadcasters’ press releases and comments in the FCC’s latest 3.0 proceeding in which they emptied Roget’s to describe 3.0 progress as “substantial,” “great,” “remarkable,” “incredible” and “tremendous in a very short period of time.”)

To get things moving again, broadcasters beseeched FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel and two other commissioners to signal that 3.0 is a priority and launch a task force that would concentrate agency resources in getting 3.0 unstuck and moving ahead.

The commissioners should grant the requests if:

1. They think it’s a good idea to preserve free, universal over-the-air TV for another generation or two, and
2. They don’t want to be remembered as the gang responsible for killing off a prime source of local news and a critical and reliable disseminator of vital information in local emergencies.

ATSC 3.0, or NextGen TV as the marketers call it, it is not a panacea, but its implementation is imperative. It will give the broadcasting a fighting chance in the ruthless TV marketplace now dominated by tech and Hollywood giants.

The standard will allow stations to keep pace with the streamers in sound and picture quality (UHD 4K will soon be “table stakes,” NAB says) and in offering basic interactive features and targeted programmatic advertising.

It will also allow them to repurpose some of their spectrum for ancillary datacasting services that may generate new revenue and serve the public interest in novel ways. Proponents talk about all kinds of useful applications in geolocation, education, public safety, automobiles and elsewhere.

For me, the great promise of 3.0 is improved reception. When the industry switched to digital in 2009, it quickly discovered that the digital signals did not propagate as well as the old analog ones.

The 3.0 standard puts out more rugged signals. Plus, it facilitates the use of repeater stations – single frequency networks. The better signals and the repeaters will greatly improve broadcasting’s reach and permit the use of small, cheap antennas in far more places.

The NAB will be celebrating its 100^th anniversary at its spring convention in April. That sounds like a good time for Rosenworcel to take the main stage declare she is all-in on 3.0 and the establishment of the requested task force to expedite rules changes, streamline licensing, knock aside any bureaucratic obstacles and mediate inter-industry disputes — in other words, to do whatever it takes to make 3.0 happen.

Rosenworcel is an unlikely champion for 3.0. She’s been a critic for years, even voting against authorizing its voluntary use in 2017. Her main gripe is that because 3.0 is not backward compatible with 1.0, consumers will be forced to buy 3.0 sets. “This is not a great boon for consumers; it’s a tax on every household with a television,” she explained in a speech.

I get it. It’s her duty to look after the interests of TV consumers, but I believe that she can do that best not by being a drag on 3.0, but by being a catalyst.

Setting aside her concern about a 3.0 “tax” for the moment, I would argue that her chief consumer concern should be making sure that broadcasting has the technology it needs to keep up with the competition and to keep pumping out free entertainment and, more important, trusted local news and information for all.

The technology it needs, the technology broadcasters are asking for, is 3.0 — state of the art pictures and sound, interactivity and blanket coverage with tiny antennas.

Policymakers have been trying to figure out what they can do to revive local journalism following the devastation of newspapers by digital media over the last decade and a half.

That George Santos was able to lie his way into the U.S. Congress last November in the largest media market is the country says all that needs to be said about the state of local journalism.

There have been proposals to give tax credits to local news outlets for the hiring of more reporters and to empower outlets to claw back revenue from Google, Facebook and others that make billions from aggregating their content.

Here now is the opportunity for Rosenworcel and the FCC to do their bit for local journalism.

I hope nobody at the FCC is foolish enough to assume that, given the hard lessons of newspapers, digital media will step forward to provide local TV news should broadcasting wither and fall. It doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes, digital just conquers and salts the earth.

To win Rosenworcel’s favor, broadcasters will have to take care of her tax problem — that is, they will have to make sure OTA viewers are not burdened with the cost of upgrading to 3.0.

One billion dollars or so should do it. For that, broadcasters should be able to buy millions of 3.0-to-1.0 converters or dongles and distribute them to OTA homes so they can watch 3.0 off their 1.0 sets. Money will be needed for a massive PR campaign to explain to people what is happening and how they can participate.

Promising the billion is easier said than done, of course. I have a hard time seeing broadcasters raising that kind of money, given that some broadcasters, like CBS and ABC, aren’t that keen on the whole 3.0 idea. But the industry might ante up if enough broadcasters believe that datacasting will produce new revenue to cover the transition costs.

Where the FCC task force could be a big help is in facilitating simulcasting efforts. As stations turn on 3.0 signals, they have to simulcast a 1.0 signal so as not to disrupt service to folks with 1.0 sets before they are equipped for 3.0.

Back in the oughts, in the transition from analog to 1.0, there was a lot of excess broadcast spectrum lying around. The FCC was able to give each station temporary use of a second channel for more than a decade for simulcasting. Even then, the transition was complicated and messy.

Without dedicated simulcast channels this time around, broadcasters have had to make do. They shuffle around channels, typically aggregating a few 3.0 channels on one station – the 3.0 host – and the 1.0 simulcasts of those 3.0 channels on another – the 1.0 host.

It takes a lot of cooperation and hard work to map out what channels go where and get everybody to agree. And approach has severe limitations.

At last count, broadcasters have managed to put 3.0 hosts stations on the air in 68 markets covering 60% of TV homes. That’s progress, but not as much as it may seem. In one of those 68 markets, Miami, where there are 19 stations broadcasting 61 channels, mostly diginets, the 3.0 host broadcasts just four 3.0 channels. That’s four out of 61.

The channel shuffling is clearly not a practical means for simulcasting on the grand scale necessary for the transition.

In any event, the method requires a lot of FCC paperwork. A task force would ensure that it is handled quickly and efficiently. And if it really wants to help, it will work with broadcasters in coming up with a more productive and comprehensive simulcasting scheme, one backed by the authority of the agency.

Proponents of 3.0 face many such challenges (see NAB comments in latest 3.0 rulemaking) that will not be met unless the FCC is a full and active partner.

The FCC chairperson has always had a standing invitation to appear at the NAB convention.

Rosenworcel should accept the invite this year, go to Vegas and promise that the agency will do absolutely all that it can do to get 3.0 moving again, not for the sake of the broadcasters, but for the sake of local journalism, for the sake of Americans who cannot afford to pay for Xfinity or Netflix and for the sake of the whatever valuable new services datacasting might yield.

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

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Harry Jessell

Each spring for many years, as Major League Baseball teams limbered up for their pre-season games, Broadcasting (now Broadcasting + Cable) would publish a survey of local TV baseball rights holders and estimates of how much they paid for those rights.

Here’s the chart from the 1985 survey. As usual, the principle rightsholders were TV stations. WMAR, had the Orioles; KTLA, the Angels; KSDK, the Cards; KTVU, the Giants; and on and on. The estimated fees totaled $116 million with WPIX and the Yankees leading the league at $14 million.

But broadcasting’s dominance of local baseball was not to last. By 1985, as the chart also shows, regional cable networks like Home Team Sports in Baltimore and Pro Am Sports in Detroit had begun scooping up rights like a slick fielding shortstop.

Over the next 20 years or so, the RSNs pretty much pushed broadcasting out of local baseball as well as hockey and basketball. The economics were on their side. They could outbid the broadcasters for TV rights because they could supplement advertising revenue with hefty affiliate fees from cable and later satellite operators.

It was a terrible loss, mitigated only by it happening gradually over many years. For years, it has been a stark reminder of the decline of broadcasting and the ascension of the MVPDs.

So, as a fan of baseball and broadcasting, I am enthralled and delighted by the ambition of E.W. Scripps to bring baseball and other local pro sports back to broadcasting.

With veteran broadcast exec Brian Lawlor on the point, the station group believe the economics — the needs of the rights holders and the teams — have swung back in broadcasting’s direction.

“We see an opportunity … right now to plant the flag and say, let’s bring some of these sports rights back where 100% of the households in a market can see local sports teams,” says Brian Lawlor, in an interview with TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp.

In a follow-up interview with me, he assured me that Scripps is as serious as a high and tight fastball. The group can pay for rights, produce the games, sell advertising and make money, he says.

As the TV contracts come up for renewal in the coming years, he says, Scripps will be at the table with the RSNs aiming for full-season packages in the major sports, although it might end up with smaller packages in partnership with the RSNs or with the teams themselves as they experiment with direct-to-consumer streaming services.

What will be different in the coming renewal cycle of the local rights is the diminished state of cable and satellite. The MVPDs have been shedding subscribers at an alarming rate for the past several years.

That has brought commensurate losses for the RSNs in affiliate fees and advertising revenue. And that means the RSNs will be looking for steep cuts in TV rights at renewal time — steep enough, if you believe Lawlor, that broadcasters can once again get in the game.

Part of Lawlor’s confidence stems from his ability to bring more than money to the negotiating table. Because of cord-cutting, teams are suffering because they can’t reach large portions of their fan bases.

MVPD reach has dropped to 50% in many markets and as low as 30% in some, Lawlor says. “It’s really hard to get people excited about your team if 70% of your audience where your team is based can’t even see your games…. It’s going to have an impact on ticket sales, suite sales, merchandise, sports betting.”

In Scripps’ hometown of Cincinnati, Lawlor notes that the Bally Sports RSN reaches only 46% of the homes. “That is a horrible business model for the Reds,” he says.

The broadcasters’ universal reach has real value. “Teams may have to decide whether they are better offer taking $10 million from the RSN and reaching 35% of the market or $5 million, $6 million, $7 million from the broadcasters and reaching 100%.”

Scripps can’t put games on any of its Big Four affiliates because of their contracts with the networks, Lawlor says, but the group has 10-12 markets with second stations that could accommodate them. If need be, he says, Scripps could acquire second stations or work with other broadcasters in other markets.

To a large extent, the local sports opportunity arises out of the financial troubles of Sinclair’s stable of 20 RSNs that it unwisely purchased from Disney in 2019 for $10 billion. Rebranded as Bally Sports, the networks have been badly battered by the cord-cutting and now appear headed for bankruptcy.

It’s unclear how things will play out for Sinclair, but rights in the Bally markets may become available at cut rates and sooner than expected.

Lawlor fully expects other broadcasters to seize the opportunity created by the RSN’s woes and says he wouldn’t be surprised to find himself bidding against some of his peers.

Indeed, Gray Television is interested. Through its Raycom Sports and Tupelo Honey units it has long and deep experience in sports production and distribution and it has established diginets in Memphis and Las Vegas filled with minor local sports.

Making the same case as Lawlor, CEO Pat LaPlatney told me Gray is eyeing the rights where it has second stations and the economics make sense. Two such markets are Atlanta and Phoenix, where Gray has the CBS affiliate and an independent and a weakened Bally RSN is the current rightsholder.

Another likely player would be Nexstar. KTLA Los Angeles and three other Southern California Nexstar stations began airing 15 games of the Los Angeles Clippers this season. “I think you’ll see more of this as times go on,” CEO Perry Sook told analysts on his 3Q earnings call last September.

Nexstar’s WPIX New York broadcasts a couple dozen Mets games each season, but that’s not new. The station has been doing so for the last two decades, mostly under prior Tribune ownership. It’s been among the few outposts of local sports on broadcasting.

Lawlor sees plain old linear broadcasting as the “savior” of the local franchises.

That might be overstating it, but local basketball and hockey attendance has been flat and baseball is struggling at the gate. MLB took a 5.7% hit in attendance in 2022 compared to pre-pandemic 2019. According to Forbes, the attendance of 67.6 million was the lowest since 1997.

I hope that Scripps and Gray have done their homework well and that their numbers add up. It would be great if they and other broadcasters could once again regularly schedule local sports. It would revitalize the station biz like nothing else I can imagine.

Sports would give them a massive infusion of top-quality programming that would spawn lucrative shoulder programming and provide a platform for promoting their news and other shows.

Sports would provide opportunities to cozy up to big advertisers, media buyers and sponsors. It will be easier to close deals after you’ve squired them to courtside seats and or sent them out to the mound to throw the first pitch in recognition of their favorite charity.

And sports would bind stations more tightly with their communities. As Lawlor says, nothing energizes a city and brings its people together more than a winning team. Broadcasters need to be fully part of that excitement and good feeling again. And it would be a gift to those who love sports but cannot afford cable or satellite.

Before Scripps went public with its plans last month, watching the Penguins, the Pistons or the Reds regularly on free over-the-air TV seemed as unlikely as CBS once again stacking Saturday night with a bunch of shows with 25 ratings.

The notion runs counter to one of the most powerful trends in TV — the migration of sports from broadcasting to other media — over the past 30 years, the broadcast networks’ renewal of national NFL football deals last year notwithstanding.

But Lawlor and LaPlatney make strong arguments for why the trend can be reversed and the public difficulties of Bally Sports tend to confirm the arguments.

RCA’s W2XBS New York (now WNBC) aired a Dodgers-Reds game from Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field in August 1939 as part of David Sarnoff’s determined drive to introduce TV broadcasting that year. Many thousands of broadcast TV games followed.

Local sports are a broadcasting birthright. It’s time for the medium to reclaim it.

P.S. Scripps will also be trying to land national sports for Ion, the fifth-highest-rated broadcast network in the land, behind the Big Four. Lawlor says that Ion could air a baseball game of the week on, say, Saturday night, but instead of airing a one-size-fits-all national game, Scripps would “localize” the broadcasts by scheduling the hometown team where it could.

“Obviously you could roll all that up, sell it together, cume it and have a big national audience with sponsors targeted for the market,” Lawlor says.

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

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Harry Jessell

“Linear TV is … marching towards a great precipice and is going to be be pushed off,” Bob Iger said at a Los Angeles conference last September. “I can’t tell you when, but it goes away.”

Not exactly what you want to hear about broadcasting and its enablers, cable and satellite, from the once and again Disney CEO who has deep roots in broadcasting and who, among much else, still oversees ABC and its string of fine TV stations.

Let’s face it. Bob has a point. Somewhere out there is a cliff and streaming TV is pushing broadcasting toward it, although I think it is farther away than Bob implied.

But I come today not to alarm, but to reassure.

Should the business of producing news and selling spots go over the edge, all will not be lost. Broadcasters have something that will soften the fall — their spectrum.

Like concrete, steel and plastic, spectrum is one of the fundamental ingredients of modern civilization. Demand for it from wireless carriers and others only grows and, consequently, so does its value.

If broadcasting as a TV medium falters, broadcasters should be able monetize their spectrum and tap that value in at least two non-broadcasting ways. They can repurpose it for datacasting or they can auction it off to the highest bidder.

Datacasting got off to a rough start back in the early oughts when the broadcasters began making the switch to digital and discovered they would have extra capacity to distribute data along with HDTV.

For a moment, datacasting was the rage. Top station groups aligned with one of two startup companies, iBlast or Geocast. Both had the same basic idea: Use broadcasters’ excess capacity to deliver digitized music, games, videos, news clips, sports highlights and matter to desktops and laptops. Broadcasters would share in the subscription revenue.

It all came to naught as the internet soon proved that it could provide rich media in any form with much less cost and fuss than the broadcast-based services could.

But with the FCC’s authorization of a new, much more capable digital standard, ATSC 3.0, in 2017, interest in datacasting has spiked once again.

Broadcast proponents led by Nexstar and Sinclair believe that they will now be able to lease spectrum to third parties for GPS-like location services; traffic and electrical grid management; public safety; emergency warnings; education; updating of software; in-vehicle entertainment; digital billboards and a host of other IoT applications where the data receivers are widely scattered or mobile.

Entering this market requires a big investment. Not only do broadcasters have to upgrade their transmission facilities for 3.0, but they will have to build and maintain single frequency networks — well-placed repeater stations around their towns — to ensure reliable and uniform signal coverage.

The BIA research firm says that datacasting could yield $10 billion in revenue by 2030 if broadcasters can lease just 20% of their digital capacity.

I’m a bit skeptical that the demand for datacasting is as great as proponents say it is. If it were, I figure at least one eager client with a killer application would have emerged by now to drive the pace of 3.0 rollout that has been, to date, lethargic.

But I could be wrong. Datacasting might prove just the thing to revive the fortunes of broadcasters. Let’s hope.

In any case, broadcasters have that other option of just selling their spectrum, bit by bit or all at once.

Technically, they have nothing to sell. They don’t own the broadcast spectrum; the American public does. Broadcasters use it under terms of a license in which they promise to broadcast in the “public interest” and obey all the FCC rules. They only have to remember to renew the license every eight years.

But we are not talking technically. In practice, broadcasters enjoy pretty much all the rights and privileges of ownership. If and when they decide they want out, they should be able to put the spectrum on the block and expect to share in the proceeds.

A precedent for doing just that was set in during the Obama administration. The FCC badly wanted to reallocate some of the broadcast spectrum to wireless communications, figuring that it would put it to better use.

The FCC could have demanded that broadcasters give up spectrum, but if it had it would have faced lawsuits and years of litigation from broadcasters who would not have given up their spectrum without a fight. And they might have won.

Just about every station owner obtained their spectrum by buying it from some other broadcasters, not by going to the FCC and asking for a license. And they paid a lot of money for it. They aren’t going to make it easy for anybody to take it away.

Because the FCC rarely revoked or declined to renew a license over the decades, the license started looking more and more like a deed.

The quasi-ownership was more or less locked in by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. NAB President Eddie Fritts persuaded friendly lawmakers to slip language into the law that makes it extremely difficult to take away a broadcast license.

The provision looks innocuous. It essentially codifies the idea that the FCC must renew licenses of stations that meet the low public interest bar and otherwise behave themselves. But with the provision, lawyers tell me that the only way a station can lose its license nowadays is to [insert graphic description here of a horrible crime].

Knowing that it couldn’t yank away spectrum without pain and delay, the FCC opted for what it called an incentive auction, the incentive being a piece of the action. Broadcasters who volunteered to give up their spectrum would share in the auction proceeds.

Many did and many got rich. The auction yielded $20 billion in 2017. Owners of 175 stations divvied up $10 billion of that and many other broadcasters would have sold had the wireless buyers been more aggressive in their bidding.

The 2017 auction should give all broadcasters some comfort. Should broadcasting go off the rails and datacasting never get on track, they should be able to cash out.

The great unknown, of course, is how much an incentive auction five or 10 years hence would yield for broadcasters, keeping in mind that proceeds have to be shared with the feds. With demand for wireless always rising and demand for linear TV lessening, it could be that the broadcast spectrum will be worth more to Verizon or AT&T than it is to Sinclair and Nexstar for broadcasting or datacasting.

In any event, it’s vital that broadcasters keep the auction option open.

The FCC’s current authority to auction spectrum of any kind expires in March, but there is plenty of interest among lawmakers in renewing it. Since 1993, FCC auctions have raised $230 billion for the federal treasury.

If renewal legislation begins to move later this year as expected, it’s imperative that the NAB be at the table to ensure that the FCC has the ability to resurrect the incentive auction — a voluntary auction of broadcast spectrum — on terms at least as favorable to broadcasters as the 2017 auction was.

A soft broadcasting landing may one day depend on it.

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

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Harry Jessell

Elon Musk really should have listened to Al Sikes.

Last spring, after Musk declared his intention to buy Twitter, but before he closed on the deal, the former FCC chairman warned Musk that, despite his big talk about free speech, he’d become a censor and stir up controversy and his other businesses would suffer as a result.

Sikes knows of what he speaks. Too much of his time at the commission during the Bush I administration was consumed with battling shock jock Howard Stern. Sikes felt he had a statutory duty to restrict indecent speech while Stern was making a name for himself by seeing just how indecent he could make radio.

“Suddenly I became one of Stern’s morning show targets including his wishing me dead when I went into the hospital for cancer surgery,” Sikes wrote in his local newspaper column that circulated via Facebook. “While there my wife answered hostile calls from some in his fan base.”

Sikes said Musk could ignore the law that encourages and empowers “good faith” policing of “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable content” or simply decide “not to worry about virulently antisocial speech.

“Either way he would have a minute-by-minute problem because a large majority of Americans care about what is published.”

It’s unlikely that Sikes’ admonition reached Musk or if it had that it would have had an impact. That’s too bad because Musk’s two-month tenure as CEO has been a well-documented disaster that has crushed not only the value of Twitter, but of Tesla as well.

My take is that Musk has made a mess of things because his libertarian and somewhat admirable impulse to give to give voice to all comers is in fundamental conflict with the implicit obligation to police not only obscenity, hate and harassment, but also the flood of misinformation and disinformation that degrades the service and makes advertisers wary.

But there is a way out for Musk, a way that he can remake Twitter into an indispensable forum for civil and productive discourse and a business justifying the $44 billion he paid for it.

He needs to rebuild in the spirit of newspaper publishing. Yes, old media can serve as a model for the new.

Surveying the wreckage of his stewardship, Musk said a couple of weeks ago that he is going to step down as CEO and find someone else to manage the wickedly complex task of deciding who gets heard on the platform and keeping advertisers happy. Good idea.

I suggest that he first hire a publisher in the old-fashioned newspaper sense of the word — someone with experience in balancing business demands against well-honed journalistic values of open-mindedness, fairness and truth seeking.

And that publisher’s first job would be to hire an editor to manage content, not as a censor according to dictates of law or regulation or outside pressure, but in line with those basic journalistic values. The editor would make sure that these values filter down throughout the organization and are embedded in the algorithms designed to automatically eradicate bots and malicious disinformation.

The publisher and editor will have to be tough enough and to tell ownership — Musk — that he is out of line when he tries to interfere inappropriately with content as he just did when he targeted the tweets of journalists, and as he inevitably will again. Musk will still have a voice, but it will be tempered.

This approach would get Musk out of content management business for which he is obviously ill-equipped; it ensures the continued independence of Twitter and puts it in position to assert its full First Amendment rights, by which I mean it puts it in position to resist attempts at regulation. It’s a strong, bold position.

Right now, regulation of social media is a real possibility. Government critics from the left and right (mostly the right) are determined to rein in social media and they have the perfect mechanism for doing it — the so-called Section 230 law that shelters social media from legal liability for defamation and other unlawful content in the posts. The protection is vital to social media. Some lawmakers have already threatened to condition it on social media accepting regulation.

As broadcasters know, such a move would not be unprecedented. From the beginnings of the broadcast medium in the 1920s, the federal government used licensing of radio and TV stations to maintain a measure of control over programming. Station owners ignored lawmakers and FCC bureaucrats at the risk of losing their licenses and their livelihoods. The government took a seat in broadcasting newsrooms 100 years ago and it has never left, even though the medium no longer dominates electronic media.

Independence, full First Amendment rights and journalistic values would fortify Twitter and other social media against government and partisan efforts to unduly influence its editorial judgment through back channels.

Over the past few weeks, pre-Musk Twitter moderators have been accused of burying the Hunter Biden laptop story and in suppressing information that contradicted the federal government’s messaging during the height of the COIVD pandemic. Such things are less likely to happen with a real journalist in charge.

Remember, it’s in the journalist’s DNA to be skeptical of official pronouncements and to challenge them. Good editors see themselves as adversaries of government and an unofficial check on its power, not as its messengers.

The newspaper model is far from perfect. For one thing, the scale is all wrong. It’s one thing to seek balanced news coverage, opinion pieces and letters to the editor for a daily newspaper. It’s another to do on the scale of Twitter where posts flood in at a rate of half a billion a day.

But the same sensibility that goes into to making up a newspaper op-ed page, if applied consistently and faithfully, can over time change the culture of Twitter, making it more civil and truthful without marginalizing fringe thinkers or stripping the service of its snark, humor and simple entertainment value.

The Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics says that journalists should “support the open and civil exchange of views, even views they find repugnant.” This doesn’t mean tolerate crackpot views. Some things are settled: the Holocaust did happen, the planet is warming, Biden did win the 2020 election. If some users disagree, they can find another platform.

When I think of people who might be suited for the top jobs at Twitter I think of recently retired journalists with impeccable credentials like Marty Baron and Dean Baquet. But, given their last jobs — top editors at The Washington Post and The New York Times, respectively — I can see conservatives screaming if they were hired.

So, I will let Musk do his own search. There are many accomplished journalists not only in newspaper publishing, but also in magazines, broadcasting, cable TV and the digital world who could do the job and have the stature and communications skills to sell the merits of the journalistic ethos to Twitter staffers and advertisers and well as to its many critics inside and outside of government.

Musk didn’t listen to Al and look where it got him. Maybe he’ll listen to me.

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

The post Memo To Musk: Hire A Publisher And Editor For Twitter appeared first on TV News Check.

Soo Kim

After twice failing to take control of Tegna by sneaking in through the back door (proxy fights), hedge fund investor Soo Kim finally won the prize by walking through the front door (a cash offer).

As we reported yesterday, Kim’s Standard General, with the help of Apollo Global Management, is acquiring Tegna for $5.4 billion in cash and the assumption of $3.2 billion in debt. The cash component breaks down to $24 a share, a 39% premium to the price before news of Kim’s bid leaked to the press and an 11% premium over Tegna’s high since been spun off by Gannett in 2015.

But there are a few layers to the deal.

As you’ll recall, Apollo bought control of Cox Media Group in 2019. Before Standard General acquires the Tegna shares, it has to sell its group of four small-market affiliates to Cox and then turn around and buy Cox’s WFXT Boston. (The group comprises stations in Providence, R.I.; Cape Girardeau, Mo.; Lincoln, Neb.; and Paducah, Ky.)

And that’s not all. After it closes on Tegna, Standard General will spin off five Tegna stations in Texas — KVUE Austin, WFAA-KMPX Dallas and KHOU-KTBU Houston — to Cox. The five are among the 62 in 51 markets that Tegna operates today.

So, Standard General gets Boston (Fox), but gives up its tiny station group along with Austin (ABC), Dallas (ABC) and Houston (CBS).

Usually, these side deals are driven by the need to comply with the FCC’s local and national ownership caps. In this case, they apparently are primarily about finance.

I’m figuring that Standard General will get more than $1 billion from the sale of the Texas stations and the small-market group. That will go a long way in helping Kim pay for Tegna.

Why Standard General is acquiring Cox’s Boston Fox affiliate is a complete mystery to me. If you have any ideas, let me know.

Incidentally, according to my arithmetic, when all is said and done, the Standard General-controlled Tegna will cover around 36% of TV homes, 3% below the FCC current de facto cap of 39%. So, Kim and Deb McDermott will have a little M&A headroom to play with.

Nonetheless, the deal might still face some headwinds in Washington.

According to the Cox press release, Standard General will hold “substantially all of the voting, common equity” in Tegna, while Cox and Apollo funds will “hold securities … that will be non-voting and non-attributable.”

Take note of the word “non-attributable.” That’s Apollo telling the FCC that although it will have financial interest in both Tegna and Cox, it will have no say in the operation of Tegna so the groups’ coverages should not be combined for purposes of the national cap. If they were, the combined coverage would soar to more than 50%, way out of bounds.

The parties hope to close in the second half of this year. And that should be possible, if the FCC and the antitrust regulators at Justice buy what Cox and Tegna are selling — that the groups will be truly independent of each other.

If that turns out to be the case, the deal will not be an example of further industry consolidation. It will simply be a change in ownership and management and the privatization of a public company.

The deal is a big win for Kim, although he probably ended up paying more than he had wanted to. The negotiation leading to yesterday’s announcement was long and strained.

Basically a hedge fund guy, Kim got in the broadcasting biz by buying the 11-station Young Broadcasting out of Chapter 11 in 2010. (Young never recovered from purchasing KRON San Francisco for $750 million in 1999 and promptly losing its NBC affiliation.)

With Young’s McDermott staying on as his top broadcasting manager, Kim went on to buy LIN Media and Media General. After a failed attempt to merge with Meredith, he sold his holdings to Nexstar for $4.6 billion in 2017.

Kim made a killing in his first foray into broadcasting and immediately looked to make another.

He wanted to acquire more stations and began buying up Tegna stock. With about 10% of the shares, he tried to gain some control on the Tegna board starting in late 2019 by electing McDermott and two other friendly broadcasters to the board.

That attempt failed as independent analysts came in with reports that Lougee & Co. was doing a good job, at least as measured against the performance of its peers.

Kim tried again last year and things got nasty when he orchestrated a clumsy effort to portray Lougee as a racist. That charge didn’t stick and once again Kim was rebuffed. If Kim was going to obtain control of Tegna, he would have to do it the old-fashioned way with a big fat check.

It’s also good day for McDermott, who always seems to come out on top even as station groups melt away beneath her. She is to be the CEO of the new Tegna. She proved that she could handle such a job when Kim put her in charge of the Young-LIN-Media General roll up.

By the way, Tegna has always been a wonderful place for women going back to its Gannett days. When Tegna was split off from Gannett in 2015, Gracia Martore stepped up to be its first CEO. Lougee took over in 2017 upon her retirement, but his two chief lieutenants are women, COO Lynn Beall Trelstad and CFO Victoria Dux Harker.

That new Tegna will be run by a woman and controlled by an Asian-American (Kim was born in South Korea and emigrated to the U.S. as a child) will be selling points at the diversity-minded FCC.

This is not the way that Lougee wanted to go out, although he won’t be hurting in his forced retirement. He owns a good bit of stock and he’s been drawing a healthy $6 million-plus annual salary.

During his run as CEO, he spent $1.7 billion on a series of relatively small acquisitions that added some quality stations and heft to the P&L. He plunged deep into the diginet business and oversaw the successful roll out of Premion, an OTT ad platform that operates on a national scale. From what I can gather, its annual revenues are now approaching $200 million.

But Lougee wasn’t an aggressive consolidator like Nexstar, Gray and Sinclair. And while he always posted solid returns, paid the now almost requisite dividends and made regular stock buybacks, he was never able to convince investors that he could make the company grow at the brisk pace they like to see. In the end, the only thing that could lift the stock price above $20 was talk of takeovers.

If you drop to the bottom of Lougee’s resume, you discover that he is one of the few station group heads who rose from the ranks of the newsroom. That pedigree is reflected in the Tegna’s solid reputation for news and in a number of news initiatives, including Verify, a fact-checking service with a national footprint, and the Atticus investigative unit based at WXIA Atlanta.

My fear is that the new regime — essentially two New York investment firms for which broadcasting is just another asset play — won’t share Lougee’s personal interest in news.

Spending extra on news doesn’t produce measurable financial returns and so it is vulnerable to the cost cutters who inevitably show up soon after the early assurances of new ownership that they love, just love, what they old guys were doing and don’t want to change a thing.

And it not just news department that may get a trim. This is another deal that is going to load up Tegna’s balance sheet with more debt. Somebody has got to pay that down.

The post Kim Gets A Win In Tegna Buy, But Will Journalism Lose? appeared first on TV News Check.

Many, many more lies would follow over the next four-and-a-half years, but the biggest one of all came after Nov. 3 when he began making the baseless claim that the Democrats had rigged the voting and stolen the election.

On cue, Trump’s Big Lie was immediately picked up by his enablers in Congress and in state houses across the country and further amplified by his tens of millions of followers on social media, by conservative TV and radio talk show hosts and bogus news outlets like Newsmax and One America News Network.

The Big Lie, as all demagogues know, is irresistible to some people, especially when they hear all the media confirm it (Nazi Germany) or when they can cherry pick from a wide variety of media so all they get is confirmation (today’s America).

This particular Big Lie cuts to the very core of our democracy. If the people don’t trust election results, there can be no peaceful transition and violence becomes inevitable. “There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and oath to the Constitution,” said House Republican Liz Cheney of Wyoming.

We all saw what happened on Jan. 6 when Trump repeated the lie and turned a political rally into boisterous protest and then an ugly and violent mob that trashed the Capitol and caused five deaths, including that of a Capitol Police officer.

Broadcasters have been doing their jobs, bringing us the sights and sounds of the rioting and reporting on the fallout, sometimes at personal risk.

But they can do more.

First, the NAB and individual broadcasters should follow the lead of some other trade groups and corporations and cut off support for the 147 Republican lawmakers who failed to certify Biden’s election just hours after the Capitol was sacked — no campaign contributions.

Let it be known that it will be no thank you to their endless invitations to breakfasts, luncheons and receptions that are no more than fundraisers until they publicly and unequivocally accept the fact that Biden won the election of 2020 and is the legitimate president.

Frankly, the NAB should have begun tossing the invitations of Trump’s more feverish backers on the Hill after he called the broadcast networks the “enemy of the people” as part of his nonstop assault on traditional media.

Yes, such a move would be bad politics. Every so often, legislation affecting the broadcasting business does move, and when it does, every vote counts. The contributions guarantee access to the lawmakers.  However, NAB may take some comfort in that the newly-Democratic FCC may look more favorably on an industry that doesn’t tolerate the undermining of a Democratic president.

NAB would be in good company. The list of those refusing to supply oxygen to the Trump lie include AT&T, Marriott, Dow, Airbnb and Morgan Stanley. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is also threatening to cut off the deniers. “There are some members who by their actions will have forfeited the support of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,” policy chief Neil Bradley told the AP.

Second, social media has caught most of the backlash for spreading election disinformation, and they have responded by trying to scrub their platforms of it, starting with Twitter’s ban of Trump himself.

But conservative talk radio has been equally culpable. Many of the colorful legion of hosts — but certainly not all — have been beating the drum of fraud as loudly as they can ever since Trump started squawking about it.

It’s got to stop. I applaud Cumulus for stepping up and, in no uncertain terms, clamping down on the fraud talk within its ranks. Cumulus is the parent of Westwood One, whose stable of talent includes Trump mouthpieces Mark Levin and Dan Bongino.

“We need to help induce national calm now,” Brian Philips, EVP of content for Cumulus, said in a memo to employees, first reported by Jerry Del Collianno’s Inside Music Media.

[The company] “will not tolerate any suggestion that the election has not ended. The election has been resolved and there are no alternate acceptable paths…. If you transgress this policy, you can expect to separate from the company immediately.”

I now await — as I know others do — a similar pronouncement from the other big distributors, iHeart Communications Premiere Networks (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck) and Salem Media Networks.

And I encourage every station owner to think again about who they are putting on the air. They are personally and morally responsible for every utterance. If they are OK with those who give credence to the Big Lie, they need do nothing. But if they aren’t, they must insist it stop or pull the plug.

In our digital-centric media age, it’s hard for some to believe that AM and FM hosts are still highly influential. But they are. “Talk radio may face an aging audience, a decline in ad revenue and competition from new mass media forms like podcasts,” said Paul Matzko in a New York Times op-ed, “but there are still millions of Americans whose politics are shaped by what they listen to on talk radio all day, every day.” (Matzko is author of The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement.)

There is something TV stations can do, too. Every news director, producer, anchor and reporter must go to the dictionary and learn all the synonyms for “unsubstantiated.” Here are a few: groundless, unfounded, baseless and unproven. And every time the charges of election fraud come up in connection with a news story, they should be sure to plug in one of the words.

As so: “An armed mob of Trump faithful surrounded the state house today, shouting baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen.”

If you are concerned that if you use adjectives you are taking sides, don’t be. You are simply affirming a well-established fact — Biden won the election fair and square.

Jessell:
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In the immediate wake of the attack on the Capitol, I thought that it would be a catharsis and that Trump supporters would see that things have gone too far. But, no. His popular support seems just as it was on Jan. 5 and, if anything, strengthened. The second impeachment and other renewed attacks on Trump, especially by some on the GOP leadership, has only served to further anger and energize his movement.

Fearing more unrest at Biden’s inauguration, law enforcement has turned the Capitol into a fortress.

All the more reason for the broadcasting industry to punish Trump’s congressional sycophants and opportunists, discipline radio voices that spread the Big Lie and double down on the truth at every opportunity.

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

The post Jessell | Confronting The Big Lie, Television Broadcasters Can Do More appeared first on TV News Check.

Harry Jessell

One of my great fears upon the inauguration of Donald Trump was that he would try to use the various levers of government to punish media that were critical of him and his policies. During the campaign, he had been relentless in expressing his antipathy, bellowing about “crooked media” and “fake” news and threatening to weaken libel protections.

But I took comfort in that the FCC was not one of those levers so easily pushed. Although the president appoints the commissioners, he has no direct authority over the agency and its deliberations.

Created by Congress to handle the nitty-gritty of implementing communications laws, the FCC is supposed to be an independent agency. The chairmen report to no one, although it’s wise that they play nice with the lawmakers who oversee the agency and pay the bills.

This is not to say that the White House doesn’t step over the line from time to time. During the Obama administration, then FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler took a much tougher stand on net neutrality than he wanted after hearing from the White House.

I was also reassured when Trump promoted Ajit Pai from the ranks of the commissioners to be chairman after meeting him and giving him the once over.

Although he was first appointed to the FCC by Obama, Pai was a solid Republican who had no prior political ties with Trump. Having watched him in action for years, I figured he was smart enough and confident enough to avoid being pulled too deeply into the Trump maw. For the most part, he appears to have succeeded.

He upset Trump when he scuttled Sinclair’s bid to acquire Tribune and he publicly schooled the president on the limits of FCC power after Trump demanded NBC lose its TV station licenses for a news report that he didn’t like.

On the other hand, some say Pai caved to pressure from Trump last fall in deciding that excess C-band satellite spectrum should be auctioned by the FCC rather than its current licensees.

But that slip, if true, is not what has me once again concerned about undue Trump influence at the FCC.

It’s this.

Trump last week essentially fired Republican Commissioner Michael O’Rielly, who was once seen as the successor to Pai. The president withdrew the nomination for a third term that was pending in the Senate.

O’Rielly’s crime was not that he was critical of Trump, only that he was not sufficiently enthusiastic about Trump’s controversial proposal that the FCC appoint itself overseer of social media and make sure they are not biased in censoring or tagging posts.

Trump is miffed that Twitter tagged one of his posts, and conservatives are convinced that all the big tech companies are somehow working against them.

Instead of lauding the proposal as another example of Trump’s soaring political genius as his fellow Republican commissioner Brendan Carr did, the thoughtful O’Rielly expressed “deep reservations” about the FCC’s authority to regulate social media.

Trump also might have misconstrued remarks made by O’Rielly on July 31, just before he sent the pink slip. In a Media Institute speech, the commissioner warned of “certain opportunists elsewhere who claim to be the First Amendment’s biggest heroes but only come to its defense when convenient and constantly shift its meaning to fit their current political objectives.”

Then this: “It is time to stop allowing purveyors of First Amendment gibberish to claim they support more speech, when their actions make clear that they would actually curtail it through government action.”

Taken out of context, the comments appear to be a direct assault on the Trump social media proposal, which has been criticized here and elsewhere as a First Amendment threat cloaked as a First Amendment safeguard.

O’Rielly, a lawyerly man who measures his words, prefaced his remarks with a clear disclaimer that they were “not in any way directed toward President Trump….”

Apparently, Trump doesn’t bother with the fine print.

From what I can gather, the withdrawal of a pending nomination is unprecedented. As such, it sends a loud and clear signal that Trump now expects nothing but absolute loyalty from his FCC appointees.

It also opens the door for Trump to assert full control over the commission should he manage to win a second term in November.

Here’s how.

He names a replacement for O’Rielly who you can bet will be solidly in his camp. He or she will make Carr look like James Comey. No wishy-washy Goldwater or Reagan Republicans with actual conservative principles need apply.

The norm for the past two decades has been for the White House to defer to Congress in the selection of the commissioners other than the chairman. But we all know what Trump likes to do with norms.

Most FCC chairmen serve only for one presidential term. So, I expect that Pai will be taking his leave early next year, creating another opportunity for Trump to pack the commissioners whose first duty will be to him rather than the Communications Act or even the Constitution.

(If Pai is not preparing to leave, he should seriously give it a thought before his reputation gets shredded by a deeper association with Trump.)

Then, it remains only for Trump to decide which of the Republicans — Carr, the O’Rielly replacement or the Pai replacement — should get the chairmanship. The prize will go to whomever he sees as most pliable.

Trump will then have complete control over the agency — three votes including the chairmanship. He’ll be able to do anything he wants. He will be able to use the agency to advance any policy or to punish any FCC-regulated company. The broadcast license will become a cudgel in his hand. Media mergers will be subject to his whims.

Late last week, there was talk that some of O’Rielly’s patrons on Capitol Hill, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, were trying to persuade the president to reconsider and restore O’Rielly.

They might succeed. Even the Wall Street Journal thought he was treated unfairly. “This is regrettable because he has been a champion of innovation and deregulation, especially in areas without glamor such as misuse of 911 fees or anachronistic rules on children’s programming. The episode is a warning that the left isn’t the only movement that demands ideological conformity.”

NAB President Gordon Smith ran to his side with a statement. “Mike O’Rielly has been a sterling public servant for as long as I have had the privilege of knowing him, a span of time covering my years in the Senate and throughout my time leading NAB. He is the consummate professional — smart, diligent, honest and fair.”

But whether O’Rielly stays or goes won’t matter in terms of the outsized influence Trump will have if he wins a second term. If O’Rielly goes, Trump finds someone else who will do his bidding. If he stays, Trump will own him. O’Rielly will have sold his soul.

Trump may not have known what the FCC was when he was elected president four years ago. But he does now. And if reelected, his people — not Obama holdovers like Pai and O’Rielly — will be running the place.

Let me restate that: A powerful man who believes that ABC, CBS and NBC news are the “enemy of the American people” will have his way at the FCC.

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

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Harry Jessell

To the surprise of many, Kabletown … err, I mean, Comcast … turned out to be a pretty good broadcaster. Since acquiring NBCUniversal in 2011, it has held its own in primetime and has poured millions of dollars into staffing and upgrading the facilities of its TV station group.

Over the past decade, broadcasters have repeatedly told me that, of the Big 4, NBC has been least demanding in negotiating reverse compensation and other contentious points of affiliate contracts.

So, it’s all the more puzzling that NBCU attempted to use its affiliate stations as barker channels for its second-rate cable networks and its new Peacock streaming service last Thursday night. Oh, let’s not forget the spot for the Harry Potter roller coaster at Universal Orlando.

The producers dressed it up as a 30 Rock reunion show, but it was nothing more than an informercial for a bunch of TV services that compete directly with the affiliates for viewers and advertising dollars. In fact, it was first shown to media buyers and their clients at NBCU’s virtual upfront earlier in the day.

Yes, the one-hour “special” highlighted some NBC shows and personalities, but they were given no special attention and were mostly lost in the blizzard of pitches for shows on USA, Syfy, Bravo, Oxygen and E! Ironically, Peacock was sold as a great place to watch the old shows you learned to love on NBC.

NBC affiliates saw that the program for what it was and many of them decided they wanted no part of it. From my talks with affiliates late last week, I’m figuring that groups reaching at least 60% of NBC’s homes preempted the show. The NBC’s 11 O&Os cover 30% of those homes.

I believe most of the rebellious affils went with public affairs. Here in Pittsburgh, Cox-owned WPXI aired a half-hour special on the pandemic and a half hour on the candidates for the House seat in Western Pennsylvania’s 17^th congressional district. (I learned a lot. Freshman incumbent Conor Lamb is the rising star in the Democratic primary, but his Republican challenger Sean Parnell is impressive.)

Affiliates with whom I spoke were clearly ticked off by the show, the preemptions speaking for themselves. “Bone-headed,” said one. Compounding the insult of being asked to air an infomercial for a host of competitors was their feeling that that they had paid through their reverse comp for actual entertainment programming on Thursday nights.

I’m told that NBC gave the affiliates two-and-a-half minutes at the end of the program and promised to make good on the ad minutes they would normally have gotten during the time slot on later dates, but that didn’t mollify the affiliates and it should not have.

They were already upset at NBC. As I wrote a few weeks ago, they are angry at the network for usurping their ability to negotiate retrans directly with the virtual MVPDs. And they have protested the NBCU decision to pre-air NBC’s latenight shows with Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers on Peacock. That affront is still unresolved.

The infomercial was the latest manifestation of NBCU’s all-for-one-and-one-for-all marketing and sales strategy.

The strategy was unveiled four years ago at the NBC upfront presentation in New York’s Radio City Music Hall. It turned out not to be an NBC upfront, but an NBCU upfront, much to the chagrin of the NBC affiliates in attendance.

At that time, NBCU CEO Steve Burke explained that the approach would save a buck and everybody’s time.

“We did it because over the last few years, we had eight upfronts. And you think of the amount of time all of us spent — two hours at each upfront, cab rides and everything else — the amount of time and money…. It really made sense to have one unified upfront.”

Of course, there was more to it to that. NBCU sales chief Linda Yaccarino explained: “Why one upfront? It’s because this is how we sell, as one portfolio.”

I just don’t it.

To sell more advertising across the board, NBCU has concluded that it’s OK to diminish one of the four most powerful and pervasive platforms in TV, a nearly 100-year-old brand, the very foundation of its highly profitable station group and the source of billions of dollars of annual retrans and reverse comp for the sake of several undistinguished basic cable networks and an untried streaming service.

And, of course, it’s apparently also OK to aggravate your longtime TV partners that account for 70% of the reach of that powerful and pervasive TV platform.

NBCU should be treating NBC as the premium asset it is, not tossing it into the marketing, promotional and sales blender with the cable networks. Do you know what E! was carrying yesterday morning while the NBC stations were airing local news, Sunday Today and Meet the Press? The unwatchable Fifty Shades of Grey and its two idiotic sequels.

If NBCU shut down USA tomorrow, it would be a one-day story in the trades. If it shuts down NBC, it would be on the front page of every newspaper and the top of every TV newscast. It would rock the business.

If NBCU were giving NBC the respect it deserves, it would not have had NBC broadcast that show and its affiliates would not have revolted. That they did should send a loud and clear signal to NBCU management that they need to rethink how they are handling their TV assets.

As Burke said in 2016, eight upfronts is too many, but one is too few.

Next spring, when, let’s hope, we will all be erasing “virtual” for our vocabularies, NBCU should stage two upfronts — one for the proud flagship and one for the rust buckets that constitute the rest of the fleet.

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

The post Jessell | NBCU Dissed Its Affiliates With The ‘30 Rock Special’ Peacock Push appeared first on TV News Check.

Two weeks ago, the heads of the Big 4 affiliate boards and their counsel met with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and his staff via Zoom.

The broadcasters reminded Pai of the good job TV stations have been doing covering both the pandemic and the protests that followed the George Floyd killing, despite the big hit on advertising sales wrought by the pandemic.

But they eventually got around to their real purpose: a plea for a little regulatory help.

There was talk of further relaxing the FCC ownership rules and getting the agency to intercede at the Justice Department, whose outdated view of the TV market is causing it to look askance at in-market Big 4 affiliate combos.

But the most interesting item on the broadcasters’ agenda was a rulemaking that Pai’s predecessor Tom Wheeler started in 2014, but that has been gathering dust ever since.

The affiliates want the FCC to act on it. And it should.

The rulemaking addresses the subset of TV streaming services known as virtual MVPDs or vMVPDs.

These are outfits like YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, fuboTV and AT&T TV Now that use the broadband pipes to do pretty much what conventional MVPDs (cable and satellite operators) do — offer a mix of local TV stations and cable networks to subscribers for a monthly fee.

In particular, the proposed rules would declare vMVPDs to be MVPDs for regulatory purposes and make them subject to retransmission consent obligations just as the MVPDs are.

The affiliates have been pushing the idea off-and-on for years, but not for the reason you might think.

They have no real beef with the vMVPDs. Their target is their own broadcast networks. The affiliates believe they not are getting a fair share of the programming fees that the vMVPDs are paying to carry their signals because the networks have usurped their negotiating rights.

Under the retransmission consent regime, MVPDs must seek permission from station owners to carry their signals. To get it, they have come to pay plenty — around $10 billion a year. Those retrans payments now account for 40% of station revenue. The industry could not do without them.

The affiliates don’t keep all they collect. They have to send a big chunk it to the networks to help cover the ever-rising cost of sports and primetime programming.

Several years ago, the vMVPDs appeared on the scene. They were first known as “skinny bundles” because they pitched themselves as low-cost alternatives to cable and satellite operators with their fat bundles.

Because they don’t use their own wires or satellite spectrum to reach subscribers, the broadband-based vMVPDs have managed to elude FCC regulation, including retransmission consent.

However, recognizing that they cannot carry broadcast signals without clearing copyright, the vMVPDs have been dutifully paying retrans-like programming fees to broadcasters. The broadcasters’ control of the copyright brings the vMVPDs to the table. Think of it as private-market retrans.

Those payments have risen steadily as the number of vMVPDs has grown and their subscriber rolls have increased. Analyst Rich Greenfield says they now have 7.7 million subs, about 10% of the MVPDs’ count.

So here is the affiliates’ problem.

Over time, the networks have cut the affiliates out of the vMVPD negotiations. The networks make all the deals, negotiating not just for the broadcast signals — those of their own O&Os and their affiliates — but also for their many cable networks. Then, they unilaterally decide how much the affiliates deserve and send checks to them.

According to one affiliate source, the money the affiliates receive through the networks from the vMVPDs has been increasing, but not as quickly as the money they receive from the MVPDs. Something is amiss.

Now back to the rulemaking.

If the FCC designates vMPVDs as bona fide MVPDs, the vMVPDs would be subject to the retrans rules and they would have to deal directly with the affiliates. The affiliates would negotiate the retrans fees, collect the money and hold the purse. They would be in a much stronger position to hang on to a larger portion of the vMVPD fees than they are now.

Unfortunately, the affiliates are unlikely to persuade the FCC’s current Republican majority to stretch retrans to cover the vMVPDs. As a rule, the Republicans are not big fans of regulations. When the Wheeler FCC launched the rulemaking in 2014, then Commissioner Pai issued a concurring statement expressing skepticism and calling it “premature.”

But there is a better than an even chance that the Democrats will be back in charge at the agency next January. They may be willing to finish what Wheeler started in 2014 and looking to do something for TV localism. After all, they aren’t going to give the broadcasters want they really want — further relaxation of the ownership limits.

Congress endowed broadcasters with retrans rights in 1992 to ensure that local TV broadcasting would continue to thrive and provide much-needed news and information as they shed viewers and advertising dollars at an alarming rate to cable.

Those rights have worked as intended. Local TV is strong, even as advertising dollars vaporize in the face of a pandemic-driven recession. It is a shame and a perversion of congressional intent that some “retrans” money is leeching away to the networks because of a regulatory quirk.

Harry A. Jessell is editor at large of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 or here. You can read earlier columns here.

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Carter had earned his spot before the African-American organization because he was a true industry pioneer. He became one of the first black station owners by buying into KPRS Kansas City, Mo. (now KPRT) in 1952. That AM along with the FM companion he put on the air in 1963 (now KPRS) are still in his family.

Carter’s message that day in 1968 was that African Americans should look beyond producing programming, spinning records and announcing. “We ultimately must own, control and operate our own means of mass communication,” he said.

Some in the room may have heeded the advice, but black ownership in broadcasting has never amounted to much. There were only a handful of black owners in 1968, and, even though Congress and the FCC created programs in the 1970s and 1980s to increase their ranks, they remain thin.

The FCC’s lastest official count (in 2017) found that just 2.3% of the 10,174 full-power TV, AM and FM stations are owned by African Americans. If you lump in other “races” and Hispanics, the percentage swells to 8.5%. Women own 7.6% of the stations.

Take a look at TVNewsCheck’s Top 30 TV groups ranking last week. You’ll see just one minority-owned group, Bryon Allen’s Allen Media, and one owned by a woman (Liz Murphy Burns’ Morgan Murphy Media). And keep in mind that those 30 groups account for 94% of TV station revenue, according to BIA Advisory Services. They represent nearly the entire broadcast TV industry.

With the country again experiencing racial strife reminiscent of 1968, we should be working to get those percentages up and the best way of doing that is by reviving the so-called minority tax certificate in Congress.

Administered by the FCC, the program granted sellers of stations to minorities a certificate that allowed them to defer capital gains taxes.

The certificate was highly popular because it benefitted both sellers and buyers. Sellers got a tax break sometimes worth millions or tens of millions of dollars and buyers got a station, often at a good discount because sellers were willing to share their tax savings.

Between 1978 and 1995, the FCC awarded 359 certificates, 285 for radio deals, 43 for TV and 31 for cable, according to the agency. The 359 was out of around 16,000 transactions, but still the program significantly increased the ranks of minority owners from .05% of all stations to 2.9%.

The late Ragan Henry, for one, took full advantage of the certificate. In 1989, the African-American broadcaster owned more FM stations than anyone in the country, bumping up against the 14-station FCC limit then in place.

Unfortunately, the Republican-controlled Congress killed the certificate program in 1995. The Republicans were not fans of affirmative action, didn’t like the tax revenue hits, doubted the connection between ownership diversity and program diversity that was one of the certificate’s justifications and,  according to some, were fuming that a major Democratic contributor like Viacom owner Sumner Redstone was set to become a major sell-side beneficiary.

Despite its sudden end, interest in the certificate has never waned and there has been near continuous efforts to revive it over the past 20 years.

The NAB tells me that the program is one of its legislative priorities with President Gordon Smith taking a personal interest. (He supported an earlier version when he was in the Senate.)

But the Republicans continue to stand in the way.

For the legislation to move, voters this fall will have to put the Dems back in control of the Senate and put Trump back in the real estate business. Actually, it might only take a Trump loss. Absent his pervasive influence, enough Republicans of a moderate bent might sign up for what is a modest affirmation action initiative.

If the Dems do capture Congress and the White House, certificate proponents will need to act fast. Since 1995, the Dems have been in control of the two branches for just two years, the first two years of the Obama administration. That window closed almost as fast as it opened.

Several arguments can be made for the certificate and other programs aimed at increasing minority ownership. Mine is simple. It’s a way to even things up. Call it a bit of reparation if you like.

In the first 50 years of broadcasting, it could not have been easy for minorities to latch onto highly-coveted radio and TV licenses when the FCC was handing them out for free.

Minorities lacked capital and the right business and government connections. And although I have  found no evidence of outright discrimination against minorities in licensing, I suspect there was plenty.

What’s more, there was in the early days a policy of not granting licenses to companies that proposed to serve niche audiences as some black applicants did. You had to serve a “general” audience.

In other words, you could get license if you intended to serve a “general” audience, meaning, I suppose, an audience of mostly white people, but not if you wanted to serve an audience of mostly black people. Doesn’t seem fair to me.

In an article for the Southern Journal of Policy and Justice, minority ownership and employment activist David Honig tells the story of white-owned WIXX-AM Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

In 1963, the FCC moved to revoke its license on the grounds that by programming part-time for the local black community, the station was reneging on its promise to serve the “general audience.” The FCC dropped the case when WIXX-AM dropped the programming geared to black audiences. That’s the way it was.

It wasn’t until the Carter administration that policymakers came around to the idea that they ought to do something to correct past wrongs and increase broadcast ownership by minorities. The certificate and other programs were the result.

While minorities have not had to deal with such blatantly unfair policies since the 1960s, it is worth noting that minority ownership has also been stunted by another powerful force: consolidation.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, the government eased way back on ownership limits in broadcasting, opening the door to station consolidators like iHeart in radio and Sinclair and Nexstar in TV.

Many small radio broadcasters — minority and non-minority — sold out to them, some because the money was good; others because they felt they couldn’t compete with the deep-pocketed groups with multiple stations in their markets.

I’m told that incumbent small broadcasters were sometimes threatened by ravenous buyers: either sell or face competition from a station with the same format and lower ad rates.

Admittedly, the tax certificate in its original incarnation had some problems. Chief among them was that some deals seemed to do more for the rich white people involved in them than they did for the minorities.

One that I remember came in 1993 when Times Mirror sold four TV stations to Argyle Communications for $335 million.

Argyle was structured so that a Katz sales executive named Ibrahim Morales would hold 51% of the equity even though he put only $153,000 into the deal, while Robert Marbut, the former head of the Harte-Hanks group, and other big investors put in nearly $50 million, according to Newsday.

Because Morales was Hispanic, his nominal 51% interest qualified the deal for a tax certificate that allowed Times Mirror to defer up to $50 million in taxes.

A year after the deal closed, Argyle sold the four stations to New World Communications for a whopping $717 million. I don’t know what Morales’s end was, but I’m sure it wasn’t anywhere near 51%. Newsday said he could be bought out of Argyle by the big money at any time for $1 million.

But the deal that did in the certificate was Viacom’s proposed 1995 sale of its cable systems for $2.4 billion to an outfit called RCS Pacific headed by Frank Washington, an African American, who as an FCC official in the 1970s helped create the tax certificate program. With the certificate, Viacom would be able to defer hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes.

Although Washington was to have a 21% interest in the RCS and act as controlling general partner, he was putting only $1 million of his own money in the deal. The rest of the equity was coming from Leo Hindery’s InterMedia Partners and John Malone’s Tele-Communications Inc.

The Washington Post got right to the point: “Viacom to Get Big Tax Break in Cable Deal.”

That headline and others like it caught the attention of the Republican Congress, which had it out of Viacom owner Sumner Redstone. After some hurried hearings, it quashed the certificate just months after the Viacom had been announced.

After that happened, Washington was sent packing and Viacom cut a new deal to sell its systems to Malone for $2.25 billion.

Last week, in the heat of the George Floyd protests and rioting, communications attorney David Oxenford reviewed the tax certificate push of Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) and Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.).

According to Oxenford, their pending bill addresses some of the objections that led to its demise in 1995 and that have discouraged some from supporting since then.

“To overcome some of the constitutional objections, the bill apples to all ‘socially-disadvantaged individuals’ — not just to businesses that are minority-owned,” he says in outlining the measure.

“To overcome the concerns about this program being exploited by big businesses that don’t need government assistance, the program proposes to cap the size of the sale that could take advantage of the certificate — a cap somewhere between $10 million and $50 million, as decided by the FCC after a rulemaking.

“The bill also requires that socially-disadvantaged individuals be involved in the management of the stations acquired, and that the properties be held for at least three years to avoid the purchased stations quickly being turned over to non-qualifying businesses.”

In recent days, Jim Winston, president of the Association of Black-Owned Broadcasters, and Radio Ink Publisher Deborah Parenti, have also called for the resurrection of the certificate.

I am championing the revival of the certificate even though I suspect that it may be too little, too late.

It’s a different media world than it was in 1995. If the certificate returns next year with a deal cap of, say, $50 million, it would be of little value in TV. That’s not going to buy you much these days and anything it would buy is probably not worth buying. It took Bryon Allen $305 million to get his toehold in the business.

There would be many more buy opportunities in radio at $50 million. But the business is simply not as appealing as it was. Faced with brutal competition from satellite radio and online audio of all sorts, radio is losing its grip on the America public and, I believe, is in an irreversible, albeit slow, decline.

I still believe Carter had it right when he said he and other African Americans “must own, control and operate our own means of mass communication,” by which he could only have meant broadcasting and publishing.

If he were speaking today rather than 1968, I think he would have a much more expansive definition of “mass communication.”

Harry A. Jessell is editor at large of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 or here. You can read earlier columns here.

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After President Trump signed an executive order calling on the FCC to police social media companies for political bias, he put out a statement and made the TV rounds heralding the order as a stroke of genius, the way to remedy the wrongs of big social media like Twitter and Facebook.

“This is really welcome news,” he gushed on a segment with Lou Dobbs on Fox Business News. “Since the 2016 election, the far left has hopped from hoax to hoax to hoax to explain how it lost to President Trump at the ballot box.

“One thing they have done is looked to social media platforms,” Carr said. “They put pressure on them for the crime, in their view, of staying neutral in the 2016 election. They are committed to not letting their platforms stay neutral in the run up to 2020.”

Politico suggested that he is trying to “leapfrog” fellow Republican Michael O’Rielly on his way to the chairmanship of the FCC in the second Trump administration should there be one. He was so effusive in praise of the order I think he might be trying to leapfrog the FCC for an even bigger job elsewhere.

He certainly succeeded to getting Trump’s attention. The president retweeted Carr’s statement as well as the Dobbs interview.

Why do I think that Carr is speaking mostly out of ambition, not principle?

First off, he sounded like a partisan hack on the Dobbs show, taking about Democratic “hoaxes” and even going so far as to dredge up a Republican talking point on mail-in ballots (House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler once opposed mail-in ballots, he said.)

But far more important, he is a communications attorney by trade. He is a former general counsel of the FCC. He knows that the FCC has no authority to meddle in social media content and, even if it did, it would have no authority to enforce any of its findings. What’s it going to do, revoke Twitter’s license?

He also knows that if the FCC is to gain oversight and enforcement duties, they would have to come from Congress, not the president and his legal skunkworks. If the FCC went ahead with social media regulations, it would be slammed by the federal courts.

The correct response to Trump’s order from any FCC official is to tell the president to go see Congress if you want the agency in the social media business. The politically correct response for Republican FCC officials is to say: “Boy, interesting idea. We will give that due consideration.” That is, in essence, what Chairman Ajit Pai and Commissioner Michael O’Rielly said.

Carr also knows that as a student of communications law, the FCC has been working hard over the past 40 years to extricate itself from content regulation of any kind. Right now, the only concerns are keeping broadcasters from airing obscenities and egregious hoaxes.

In 1987, the FCC, led by Republican Chairman Dennis Patrick, repealed the fairness doctrine, completing years of work begun by Patrick’s predecessor Mark Fowler.

The essence of that landmark decision was that TV and radio no longer had to be politically neutral platforms. They could be as opinionated and partisan as they wanted to be.

No longer would the FCC be put in the constitutionally troubling position of deciding what’s fair and what’s not.

President Reagan backed the FCC on the decision, even though he was warned by staff that scuttling the doctrine would expose him to more criticism from the left-leaning networks.

By the way, the repeal turned out to be a boon for conservatives as Rush Limbaugh and others took to the air to rally conservative thinkers (and non-thinkers) and, you could argue, eventually give rise to Trumpism.

Now, Carr would turn the fairness repeal on its head and use the FCC to police social media companies and make sure they are being perfectly neutral, that they not putting their thumb on the political scale through censoring or tagging user posts. In other words, he wants the FCC to ensure that they are fair.

According to a federal law known as Section 230, social media are not legally responsible for the user content they host, except for copyright infringement. They can’t, for instance, be sued for libel if one of their users libels somebody.

But there is a provision aimed at keeping the social media from devolving into an unmitigated cesspool.

Without risking their legal immunity, it says, social media companies may take “good faith” action to restrict access to posts they “considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”

The immunity afforded by Section 230 is a privilege and it is hard to see how social media could function without it. Incidentally, Section 230 also protects websites with comment sections.

Carr would use the power to revoke that privilege just as the pre-Reagan FCCs used the power to revoke a broadcast license — to threaten media for not being fair.

Former ABC and Fox lobbyist Preston Padden made the point in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week: “Conditioning key protections on compliance with a government content review would be censorship by a different name.”

Turning his back on the lessons of 1987, Carr believes — or says he believes — the FCC can serve as the place to judge political content in a non-political way.

He must know this is nonsense.

The FCC is, by its nature, a political body. All of its members are appointed by the president and, inevitably, the chairman and two members — a majority — are loyal members of the same party.

So, the FCC is going to look at any fairness complaint against social media through political eyes. And the majority is going to make its decisions along political lines. It’s the nature of the beast.

And they will get away with it because the good faith standard is mighty, mighty vague.

Some FCC majorities might see many of Trump tweets as “excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable” and excuse Twitter and Facebook for taking action against them. Others might find everything Trump has ever tweeted as beyond reproach.

In a May 29 tweet, Carr said that Twitter is “punishing speakers [users like Trump] based on whether it approves or disapproves of their politics.”

In advocating for FCC intervention, Carr is opening the door for the agency to punish speakers (social media companies) based on whether they approve or disapprove of their politics.

By the way, given all that he has said, does anybody believe that Carr would be a fair arbiter of what’s fair and what’s not?

He has revealed himself to be totally in the tank for Trump.

In fact, I would argue that, if somehow the FCC does end up policing social media, he should recuse himself from any proceeding involving Twitter and Facebook.

Finally, Carr presents himself as a First Amendment champion.

In April, he was up on his soap box, blasting the dopey left-wing media watchdog Free Press for its ill-conceived petition to force broadcasters to censor or put disclaimers on statements by Trump and others concerning COVID-19 that are found to be false or scientifically suspect. The FCC made short work on the petition, dismissing it on First Amendment grounds at the staff level.

“It’s a dangerous and sweeping attempt by the left to weaponize the FCC against broadcasters and conservatives and politicians,” Carr told a Breitbart interviewer.

Yet, he willfully fails to recognize that Twitter and Facebook are private companies with full First Amendment rights, just like newspapers and broadcasters. They are allowed to post or not post anything they want on their platforms.

If Twitter’s Jack Dorsey wants to tag every Trump tweet with “Ignore this man; he’s a flaming idiot,” he has every right to do it.

It concerns me, as it does a great number of policymakers across the political spectrum, that Twitter and Facebook now have it both ways. They can profit by allowing all manner of misinformation, viciousness and defamation by users and, because of Section 230, they can escape all responsibility for it.

But what to do about it is a question for Congress — not Trump, the FCC or the striving Carr — to decide.

Rembering Mike Gravino

Throughout the endless debates over the incentive auction and channel repacking, the high-power TV broadcasters with major network affiliations and policymakers in Washington tried to ignore the interests of low-power TV broadcasters.

Mike Gravino made that impossible.

As founder of the LPTV Spectrum Rights Coalition, Gravino fought incessantly for the rights of LPTV and translator operators. His efforts culminated when the Congress finally cut LPTV and translator operators in on millions of dollars set aside for the post-auction channel repacking.

Last Saturday, Gravino’s voice was silenced by pancreatic cancer.

I did not know Mike well. I confess that as editor of TVNewsCheck I did not give him or the LPTV/translator world the attention it probably deserved, despite his entreaties.

So, I will share this remembrance from communications attorney and LPTV pioneer Michael Couzens of Oakland, Calif.:

To say that he was dogged would be to highly compliment our canine friends. Many found him abrasive, and said so. But they should ask themselves now: if a person is unknown and invisible, can they have an influence? Be effective?

Mike once lived near Eastern Market in Southeast Washington. From there, it was about a 30-minute run to the House Rayburn or Russell Senate Office Buildings.

I used to joke that legislative assistants had a signaling method, so that when he was seen coming down the hallway, they could hide under their desks or give the receptionist a reason why they were not there.

Mike’s accomplishments were significant. With an email newsletter, meetings at the NAB conventions, and informative brochures, he generously shared updates for all who might be interested in low-power television.

And he never forgot the TV translators and rural America. I’m writing this next to his baseball cap with the slogan “SAVE LPTV” and in smaller type “& TV Translators.”

His advocacy on the Hill worked in tandem with his staff encounters at the Federal Communications Commission. The D.C. presence was not lucrative, but often effective, a rare instance of lobbying for a positive public purpose.

Now Mike is wandering the Golden Hills. He will not see many members of Congress or legislative assistants there. For the most part, they are consigned to the Other Place. 

But should he run into the shade of an exemplary L.A., may he be granted one more opportunity to unleash his version of an uninhibited charm offensive.

Harry A. Jessell is editor at large of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 or here. You can read earlier columns here.

The post Jessell | Trump’s Order On Social Becomes Carr’s Folly appeared first on TV News Check.

But wireless cable has been tried twice since the turn of the century and twice it has badly flopped.

The first to try it in 2003 was USDTV, which had the backing of major station groups looking for a way to monetize the multicasting capabilities of the new digital ATSC 1.0 standard. For $20 a month, it offered, in addition to the major broadcast networks, Fox News, ESPN, Discovery and several other popular cable nets.

But it fizzled out after a four-year run in 2007, stranding subscribers in Salt Lake City, Dallas, Albuquerque and Las Vegas.

Undeterred by that example, another startup called Sezmi decided to give it a go. Sezmi thought it could succeed where USDTV failed by adding an on-demand streaming component and a set-top box with a DVR capable of recording more than 1,000 hours of programming.

The service was priced at $20 a month with subscribers picking up the cost of the box ($150). It put together a nice package of basic cable programming, although it never had ESPN.

It launched in Los Angeles in early 2010, but never got far, pulling the plug in September 2011 after burning through tens of millions of dollars.

If you are interested in learning more about Sezmi, you can ask CBS CTO Phil Wiser. He was co-founder and president of the enterprise.

Now comes another upstart, Edge Networks, based in Boise, Idaho. Its Evoca service is similar to Sezmi. It, too, is a hybrid of broadcasting and streaming so subscribers will not only need a good antenna, but also a decent broadband connection.

It figures on charging subscribers $50 a month for an 80-channel service that will include the local broadcast channels, the major basic cable channels and streamed on-demand programming. The $100 set-top box will also provide access to unaffiliated streaming services like Netflix.

That promise of 80 channels in a bit misleading as it includes local broadcast channels that are freely available to everybody. The Evoca box is designed to integrate the local signals with the imported programming into a single user interface and remote.

The plan is to launch the service in Boise this summer using two low-power TV stations (KBSE-LD and KCBB-LD) that Edge Networks is leasing from well-known LPTV operator Gary Cocola. The stations are already on the air in test mode.

The entrepreneur behind Evoca is Todd Achilles, who comes from the mobile industry, where he worked on both the network and device sides of the business for T-Mobile, HTC and Hewlett-Packard.

I spoke to Achilles last week and he seemed confident that from his small start in Boise (DMA 102), he can roll out the service market-by-market as he proves the concept and brings in enough investors to make the venture self-sustaining and profitable. From Boise, he will move on to other markets in Idaho and Montana. His ultimate goal: 50 million homes.

My big question for Achilles was what’s different? In light of USDTV and Sezmi, what makes you think you can make a business out of broadcasting cable?

ATSC 3.0, he says: “If there is one takeaway I would leave with you, it’s that 3.0 really does change the rules.”

According to Achilles, the new standard has more capacity than the ATSC 1.0 standard that his wireless cable predecessors were stuck with, generates a more robust and reliable signal and is broadband friendly.

“Because 3.0 is effectively the same streaming protocols that you have over the internet, you can put them together in a way where the end user or the customer has no idea what they are watching, how it got to their TV,” Achilles says. “That is exactly what we are trying to do.”

To get to 80-plus channels, Achilles says he intends to squeeze 20 HD programming channels into each of his two 6 MHz broadcast channels.

That seems like mighty aggressive channel packing to me, but I have been told by broadcasters deep in the 3.0 weeds that it can be done if you are willing to trade off much of the robustness of the signals – in other words, if you are willing to sacrifice some of the quality of reception and coverage.

Achilles understands the tradeoff. “So, we don’t aspire to sell – and we won’t sell – our service in areas where we don’t have strong, reliable robust signals,” he says. “We have identified specific zip codes where we know we have got great signal strength either on indoor or an attic antenna. That is where we offer the service.”

Achilles says he knows he can deliver 40 channels of HD to enough Boise homes because he has been doing it during the test phase. He invites anybody with a 3.0 receiver to come to Boise and see for themselves.

Evoca’s basic pitch is that it is, at $50 per month for the service and $100 for the box, a low-cost alternative to cable, satellite and virtual MVPDs like YouTube TV and AT&T TV Now. Achilles says he expects the price of vMVPDs to rise steadily, creating a widening price gap that Evoca will be able to exploit.

Achilles says he enjoys other important advantages over the vMVPDs. To subscribe to Evoca, you need a basic broadband service, he says, but you don’t need a costly premium service with large or unlimited data plans as you do with the vMVPDs.

And by putting a 1.0 tuner in its set top, Evoca can pack in the local Big Four affiliates without having to pay retrans for them. That is a big — and perhaps decisive — savings in programming.

The extra tuner will also allow Evoca to include the many Spanish-language, religious and ‘classic” entertainment channels that make up the free over-the-air world these days.

The only thing I see missing is a DVR in the box. I get that it would add a lot to its cost, but for me and a lot of other TV viewers it has become indispensable. Achilles says he understands the value of the DVR, but says it “is relatively less now in a world with all these VOD services.”

In Boise, Achilles has the ideal market to test and showcase his service for investors. According to him, it’s a fast-growing market with some 300,000 homes; the big local cable operator, Sparklight, is losing interest in video and focusing on broadband; and, with most homes tucked in a valley, broadcast signals propagate well.

Unfortunately, the rest of America is not Boise. Even if Evoca succeeds there and in similar small and medium markets, it has no guarantee it will make it in markets with fiercer competition, more challenging broadcasting topography or higher cost of leasing spectrum. The 50-million-home target may be more aspirational than real.

I didn’t get all my questions answered by Achilles. He’s not saying what his break-even number of subs is in Boise, what cable networks he has lined up or how much money he has raised or will have to raise to sustain the operation in its early years. That makes it hard to pass any judgment on its prospects.

So, let’s see what happens this summer. Let’s see if those signals have sufficient reach, if the package contains all the “must” cable networks and if consumers find it a better value than the established multichannel pay players.

The major broadcast networks and their affiliates may not want to root for Evoca because it will pay no retrans and it may erode the sub base of MVPDs and vMVPDs that do pay. But they should pay close attention to the service. It may become the first to generate a buck from ATSC 3.0 by tapping its power in an unconventional way.

Harry A. Jessell is editor at large of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 or here. You can read earlier columns here.

The post Jessell | Keep An Eye On Wireless Cable 3.0 appeared first on TV News Check.

As expected, business closures and stay-at-home orders had put a dent in 1Q and were making a wreck of 2Q. As our Jack Messmer reported yesterday, the consensus was that 2Q sales would be down 32%-40%. Fox was the outlier at 50%. These numbers reflect mostly core sales. Only Sinclair offered official guidance for 2Q. It said core would be off 32% to 39%.

None of the broadcast executives would venture any guesses at what the economic disruption would mean for the entire year.

But it’s clear from the magnitude of the 2Q hit and the knowledge that the country’s return to normalcy would take considerable time that 2020 would not be the year that broadcasters had envisioned last year when they were making their annual forecasts.

Bright predictions of double-digit ad growth driven by record political spending have gone up in a cloud of microbes. Flat would be a great victory.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is the TV broadcasting business has shown itself to be fundamentally sound, thanks to the ever-growing stream of retransmission consent payments and the immunity from economic ills affecting the highly lucrative political advertising that pours in every two years.

Unlike their badly distressed broadcast cousins in radio, the fortunes of TV stations no longer rely solely the vagaries of advertising. (The pandemic’s impact on radio will be measured not just in lost revenue, but in how many stations go silent.)

The other good news is that in this crisis TV stations have shown that they can adapt, that they can carry on in the face the extraordinary conditions imposed by the pandemic. They continue to produce a full slate of newscasts with anchors and reporters roaming the streets for stories as they always do.

“It’s important to recognize… that our television stations are alive, well and serving their communities,” Gray Co-CEO Pat LaPlatney told the Wall Streeters.

That stations are alive and well has been confirmed by the surge in viewership that all station groups are experiencing.

“Since the COVID-19 outbreak, we are seeing significant year-over-year increases in our already strong local news viewership, both on air and online,” said Nexstar CEO Perry Sook.

Sinclair CEO Chris Ripley calls the surge — not the advertising shortfall — the “biggest effect” of the pandemic so far.

Scripps CEO Adam Symson said ratings and impressions are up 10% to 50%. “We believe we have moved into a new era for the journalism industry, one in which news, especially local news, is again a must-have for most Americans,” he said.

The broadcasters talked of belt-tightening, including postponing capital projects, which is not good news for the media technology sector. Sinclair CFO Lucy Rutishauser said the company has identified $130 million in savings this year, including $30 million in “non-essential capex.”

But most made the point of crediting their employees for the jobs they are doing and reassuring them that that layoffs, salary cuts and furloughs would be the last resort.

Even Tegna, which took some heat (here and elsewhere) for previously announced cuts and furloughs, made no hint of layoffs to follow. (I see that NBCU is taking out the ax, finally giving Tegna some badly needed cover.)

Stations have been able to maintain service in part because they plan for disasters, for drastic disruptions in their normal ways of doing things.

I doubt that any had a specific plan for a pandemic that required news staffers to keep their distance from one another and from people on the street and other news sources. But they had certainly had parts of other plans that they could piece together to help meet the present crisis.

And what plans they didn’t have, they made up on the fly.

In an interview last week with TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp, Fox’s EVP of Engineering Richard Friedel talked about how the Fox stations were meeting the operational and technological challenges. “We had all kinds of disaster plans and redundancy planning, but not quite for this,” he said. “We never really planned for everybody to go home and we are going to do a broadcast together.”

Finding ways to allow news staffers to collaborate from home was a big challenge, Friedel said. It’s one thing to tell salespeople to work from home, he said. “They were not hugely impacted. But when you tell an editor he is going to have to work from home and use a remote desktop to edit content in the station, that is a radical change in how they work.”

Often, it meant scrambling for the right equipment, he said. “We had lots of systems that weren’t obviously adapted to that, like a teleprompter.”

Also hampering home production was that some staffers didn’t have adequate internet connections in their homes, he said. This is something that broadcasters need to think long and hard about. Yes, the internet is a powerful tool, but it’s so powerful that I fear that stations are becoming totally dependent on it. What if the next crisis is not a real virus, but a virtual one that brings down or hobbles the internet? What then?

Fox also had to make the studios and control rooms as safe as possible for those who had to come in, Friedel said. “We were the first I know of that put plastic wrap over control panels,” he said. “You come in, clean the control room on your shift, put down the plastic wrap, at the end pick it up, clean the control panel again. The next guy comes in and repeats the whole deal. A simple concept.”

All the groups are developing work-arounds and I suspect that some may prove more efficient and stick around after the virus burns itself out. Gray’s LaPlatney wasn’t so sure. In a Q&A with us this week, he said efficiency is fine, but effectiveness is critical. “You might be able to save a little money doing something, but is that ultimately going to cost you?”

Let’s not forget about the networks and the syndicators. Even as they, too, have watched advertisers flee, they have adhered to the adage that the show must go on. I’ve been amazed at what the latenight talk shows, Saturday Night Live and others have able to pull off.  If you haven’t already done so, check out our stories on how Rachael Ray and Deborah Norville are doing their shows from home.

I hope the CEOs and CFOs are right — that the worst is past, that stores, restaurants and other consumer-facing businesses will open up soon in large numbers over the summer and the advertising dollars will flow as before. But nobody really knows. We are in uncharted waters. But I do know that even if the belt gets tighter, broadcasters will find a way.

They always do.

Jamie, Can’t You Even Pretend You Care?

On the quarterly conference calls, the questions from the analysts are mostly predictable, but every once in a while you get one that makes you wonder if the stock-ownership corporations and broadcasting are a good fit.

I had to wait for the last question on the week’s last call (Scripps) for this doozy from Jamie Zimmerman of the Litespeed Partners hedge fund. Asserting that Scripps has the highest employees-to-station ratio, she suggested that the pandemic is an opportunity “to take that number down and actually let go a bunch of employees who perhaps were redundant and not necessary.”

CEO Adam Symson was such a gentleman in responding:

“Hi, Jamie. It’s Adam. Wow, I guess I would tell you I don’t see this in any way as an opportunity,” he said. “And right now, we’re very focused on the health and welfare of our employees.

“I don’t necessarily think it’s also an accurate statement that we have more employees across our stations than other groups. So, at this moment, we don’t feel the need to execute furloughs, pay cuts and layoffs.”

It’s not how I would have responded. Just another reason I’m not a CEO.

Wharton Hangs It Up

I got to know Dennis Wharton during the Al Sikes administration of the FCC in the early 1990s when I was reporting for Broadcasting magazine and he for Variety and I was beating him like a drum on the fin-syn story, possibly the most contentious and high-profile proceeding in FCC history. His recollection of who got the best of that story may differ, but I think he would agree that it was a friendly rivalry.

We became and stayed friends, even as he moved to the “dark side” (his term) in 1996, forsaking journalism and joining NAB as its chief spokesman. Last week, nearly a quarter of a century later, Dennis announced that he was retiring from the post, handing over the press handling to his capable seconds, Ann Marie Cumming and Zamir Ahmed.

Testament to Dennis’s value to NAB (and possibly his political acumen) is that he survived the upheaval that led to the ouster of his first boss, Eddie Fritts, in 2005 and the short, troubled reign of his second, David Rehr, and then went on to win the trust of current chief Gordon Smith.

Dennis was of the rope-a-dope school of PR. He wouldn’t lie, but you could punch yourself out questioning him on a story that might put the industry or the NAB in a bad light. In such cases, the best I could get out him was a little direction — that way is a dead end; this way may be more fruitful.

He was effective in his job because he accommodated reporters on the little things, building goodwill that would prove invaluable when dealing with them on the big things or in planting a story.

Dennis didn’t sit around waiting for reporters to call. He was an active participant in countless legislative and regulatory battles, making sure NAB’s arguments were always heard loudly and widely. Broadcasters do a lot of good deeds in their communities. Dennis made it his mission to make sure they did not go unnoticed in the press and in Washington.

I am going to stop now before this begins to sound like a eulogy.

I look forward to taking him to a long lunch at one of his favorite restaurants along Connecticut Avenue near the old NAB headquarters. I might finally get the real story.

Harry A. Jessell is editor at large of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 or here. You can read earlier columns here.

The post Jessell | For Local TV, Flat Would Be A Victory Now appeared first on TV News Check.

If you read my column last week, you know I was rooting for Lougee, having been reassured of the company’s financial and operational soundness and believing that it is best for the company and its employees for Lougee and his team to have ample insulation from the demands of an unhappy and impatient shareholder.

After the vote, Kim issued a concession statement that fell short of concilatory. He said, in essence, he will be keeping a close eye on the company. (How could he not? That stake of his is worth nearly $300 million.)

Although he lost the vote, he said he feels he has succeeded in putting management on notice that it has to improve its performance and become more transparent and responsive.

He also did something that he should have done more of during the proxy campaigning — showed some empathy for Tegna’s employees.

He says he appreciates the reporters, producers and AEs that make it all happen. “The work Tegna’s people do on the front lines to provide reliable news to Tegna’s communities has never been more important,” he said.

Kim also took a shot at Tegna for furloughing staff in the face of pandemic-related advertising losses. “We have heard the anecdotes of trusted anchors off the air during May sweeps and a chief meteorologist missing on-air amidst tornado season,” he said.

I’m curious to see Kim’s next move.

In addition to the Tegna stake, Kim has an odd assortment of other radio and TV holdings. During the proxy fight, Tegna charged that they represented a conflict of interest.

Kim is backing Deb McDermott (one of his proposed alternate Tegna board members) as she builds a station group from the ground up. So far, she has bought two TV stations from Phil Lombardo’s Citadel Communications and, pending FCC approval, nine TV stations and 15 radio stations from Waypoint Media and Vision Communications.

And he has also set up a venture with Jeff Smulyan’s Emmis Communications to accumulate unspecified media properties. Emmis seeded Medico Holdings with two of its New York FMs, WBLS and WQHT. In exchange, Emmis got from Standard Media $91.5 million in cash, a $5 million note and 24% stake in the new company.

If there is strategy behind all that, I don’t see it.

Report Card Time

Starting with Sinclair this Tuesday, the publicly-traded station groups begin releasing their 1Q earnings and teleconferencing with analysts who cover them. This will be our first opportunity to assess the actual damage to advertising revenue from the pandemic not only in the first quarter, but also in the second.

Everybody is expecting the worst. In an interview we posted earlier this morning, Magid’s Bill Day said he believes that advertising may have fallen as much as 60% in March and April.

But there sometime else to look for in the reports and the analyst calls — the impact that cable and satellite cord-cutting is having on the group’s retransmission consent revenue. The retrans payments are based on the number of subs. Every lost sub is money out of the pocket for the broadcasters.

According to a survey by The Wall Street Journal in February, the larger cable and satellite companies lost about 5.5 million subs last year, an 8% decline in total subscribership and 70% more losses than the 3.2 million of 2018.

In in the 4Q calls earlier this year, I noticed that the station groups were talking more about cord cutting than they have before and were quantifying the losses resulting from it. Brian Lawlor at Scripps and Dave Lougee at Tegna pegged their losses at low to mid-single digits.

Those losses could get worse.

In an April 24 call that analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson hosted for their clients to discuss the impact the pandemic was having on big media and advertising holding companies, Moffett said cord cutting may not register big in 1Q, but it will in 2Q. He predicted a “sharp acceleration” due to the lack of sports and the “huge financial pressure” that many households will be under because of the pandemic.

The cord cutting is unlikely to become so bad as to flatten or significantly slow retrans revenue growth because the per-sub fees are still going up. But it should still be a cause for concern, especially if we fall into a long recession and ad revenue doesn’t bounce back.

Stock Market Check-In

I don’t anticipate stocks of the public stations group will suffer much more than they have following release of the 1Q earnings. Investors have already beaten down the broadcasting shares. All are way off their 52-week highs. As of the Friday closes, Sinclair is off 75.7%; Scripps, 67.2%; Gray, 52.2%; Nexstar, 50%; and Tegna, 42.4%.

Here are the footnotes to those percentages: 1) Gray and Nexstar were in fine shape until the markets caught up to the seriousness of COVID-19 and starting tanking in the third week of February; 2) Sinclair’s poor performance probably has less to do with broadcasting than with the string of regional sports networks it bought last year (is there a worse TV business to be in right now?); and 3) Tegna’s stock has been most resistant to the downturn, but that may be due to its having approached in early March by suitors who thought the company was worth around $20 million, a $2 premium on its 52-week high.

Nexstar’s AE Solution

The station employees that are getting hurt the worst in this econo-demic may the AEs — at least financially. Most work on straight commission. That means they are experiencing the same sharp drop in income as the stations are in their advertising revenue.

Station groups are looking for ways to get the AEs through the next few months as the pandemic continues to take a toll on business.

Here’s Nexstar’s voluntary plan: The company calculates each AE’s average monthly earnings over the past 12 months. For the three months (April, May, June), it pays the AE that monthly average. If over the three months, the AE’s actual commissions come up short of the monthly average (as they most certainly will), he or she will have to pay back the shortfall to the company at 0% interest over the next year.

It’s not a perfect solution. The AEs who accept the deal will be able to get through the worst of the pandemic without losing any income. On the other hand, they will likely be burdened with a fat debt after the three months — one I suspect they soon will resent having to pay off.

Access For All

Since the early days of radio, broadcasters have fought for access to press conferences, official proceedings and other newsworthy events — for the right to bring microphones and later cameras everywhere a reporter with his pen and pad may go. It’s been a long struggle. Cable networks like C-SPAN and CNN entered the fray 40 years ago, often leading the charge.

Today, the electronic media will achieve another milestone. For the first time in history, they will be able to air live audio of a Supreme Court argument. Up to now, they have been restricted to recorded audio that is not immediately available and video remains verboten.

The milestone is actually incidental to another extraordinary event. Because of the pandemic, the high court is hearing arguments via audio-only teleconference this month. The justices will all be in their homes as will the opposing attorneys.

C-SPAN made its first request to allow cameras in the court in 1988, but the court steadfastly refused, even as it began allowing use of recorded audio starting with the highly charged arguments in Bush v. Gore in 2000.

Writing in The Washington Post last week, C-SPAN General Counsel Bruce Collins said he believes there will be no going back on the live audio.

“Having been given live access to the court in the spring, the public and the news media would certainly expect to have it in the fall when a new term begins. The court’s move toward greater transparency should continue after the pandemic abates — and once the justices have become comfortable with live access, adding video coverage is the next logical step,” Collins said.

The first case gets underway today at 10 a.m. ET with C-SPAN 1 and C-SPAN Radio, if no one else, promising live coverage. The case pits the Patent and Trademark Office against Booking.com over a trademark dispute. The Washington Post had a nice piece on how the attorney for Booking.com is prepping for the occasion.

It’s not the kind of case likely to draw much interest. But on May 12, the court is set to hear arguments on President Trump’s efforts to block congressional committees and a New York district attorney from subpoenaing his banking and financial records, which could answer a lot of questions. Just how much is he worth, where did his money come from and who is backing all his loans?

You can bet it won’t just be C-SPAN covering that one live.

Harry A. Jessell is editor at large of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 or here. You can read earlier columns here.

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As someone who has been following local broadcasting for 40 years, such headlines grabbed my attention. They didn’t jibe with what I know about TV broadcasting, a major player in local news throughout the country. The virus wasn’t crippling broadcasting and it surely wasn’t killing it.

When I poked into the stories, I quickly discovered the disconnect. They weren’t about local news — not in its entirety. They were focused on newspapers and other local publications.

In the Times article cited above, it was OK, if we can forgive a somewhat misleading headline, but in others it was journalistically negligent, especially so in those that ponder what can be done to save newspapers. They are based on the faulty notion that the loss of newspapers will immediately cast the citizenry into darkness with nowhere to turn for local news and information.

To write about saving local journalism without factoring in the role of television is absurd. It’s like writing about energy policy and forgetting about, say, natural gas.

Ben Smith is the new media columnist for the New York Times. He comes from the digital media world and still apparently has much to learn about the local media world.

In his March 29 piece, he quotes Elizabeth Green, founder of a nonprofit that is trying to cover local schools, to undergird his premise. “We need to accept that what local news is today is already dying,” she says.

No, we don’t. Some of what local news is today may be dying, but not all. Smith and Green need to wake up and turn on their TVs.

Here are some things they may learn.

There are more than 700 news-producing TV stations in the U.S., each cranking out several hours of news every day. Collectively, they cover virtually every TV home.

Over the past few weeks, thousands from those stations — producers, reporters and photographers — have been on the street, putting their health, if not their lives, on the line to keep their communities up to speed on the pandemic.

It’s what they always do in the face of national and man-made disasters. They may not always be first responders, but they are close second responders. And they don’t go away. The also tend to stick around to report on and sometime participate in recovery and relief efforts.

And local TV news is not struggling financially or being crippled by the pandemic. In fact, ratings are up for local TV news as they are for the broadcast network evening news. People are watching.

And as I reported here last week, the biennial windfall of political advertising and the steady stream of retrans money should allow most stations to grow revenue this year and avoid layoffs in the newsroom.

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Craig Aaron of the liberal Free Press, proposed the federal government set aside $5 billion “to sustain journalism over the long term,” including $2 billion in grants for local newspapers and alt-weeklies.

In the Atlantic article I referenced above, Steve Waldman and Charles Sennott had a less drastic (and costly) idea for rescuing local news. The federal government, they said, should make a point of directing large portions of its advertising spending to local media. They didn’t say what kind of local media, but from the context it was clear they meant newspapers.

Both prescriptions failed to take notice of TV stations and their important role in local journalism.

I understand that the loss of newspapers is a terrible thing and should be mourned. In their best days, they provided a depth and breadth of reporting that TV stations never have.

They routinely covered municipal government in all its manifestations and by so doing kept elected officials, administrators and the cops in line. No politician wanted to be on the wrong side of a paper’s editorial board or publisher.

They didn’t just report the crimes, fires and accidents, they looked into why they were happening. They had columnists who wrote with pathos and power. They had sports writers who doubled the fun of following a team with their coverage, stats and colorful commentary. A newspaper was where fans could savor the wins and share grief at the losses.

Over the years, newspaper and TV stations nicely complemented each other editorially, even as they viciously competed for the local advertising dollars. The stations supplied the immediacy and the video, while newspapers supplied the details, the dramatic stills and insight.

Last year, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the shooting deaths of 11 people at a synagogue the prior fall. But I can tell you as a Pittsburgher that on the day of the shooting it was local TV that people turned to follow the evolving story, not the paper’s website.

If this pandemic is, indeed, the last straw for beleaguered papers in many cities and towns, I hope that TV stations step up and become more like newspapers. That will not be easy. Stations have historically been resistant to change and most are now owned by giant public companies that will be reluctant to make the necessary heavy editorial investments.

But even as they are, TV stations fill a vital role in their communities, never more so than now with COVID-19 on the loose. They are also a vital force. There may be an existential crisis in newspaper publishing, but not in local news.

N.b. Former Obama-era FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler was back at it last month with a piece on the Brookings Institution website. It is primarily an indictment of social media, which he says divides rather than unites the population by feeding us messages that “reinforce our tribal traits.” He says this will become even more alarming if, because of the pandemic, political campaigns have to rely more heavily on social media this year. That will be bad news for the Republic because there is no legal mechanism to regulate social media and temper its harmful effects.

Then Wheeler’s argument takes a weird turn. Since you can’t regulate social media, what can you do? Wheeler answer: Force TV broadcasters to give free airtime to candidates because they have the ability to “deliver a common message on a broad scale.”

It’s a dumb old idea that is being resurrected at the worst possible time. As I just said above, broadcasters are counting on billions of political dollars to stay in the black this year. According to BIA, it will be their No. 1 ad category this year. Take those dollars away and it won’t just be newspapers grasping for breath.

Harry A. Jessell is editor at large of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 or here. You can read earlier columns here.

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Just a month ago, everything was fine. In fact, better than fine. All indicators pointed to record political spending. Still thinking he could buy the Democratic nomination despite his personality deficit, Mike Bloomberg was spending in a way — $500 million! — that would shatter those records. Last fall’s forecasts of double-digit growth looked like a sure thing.

But then the fattest, loudest canary in the coal mine — the Dow Jones Industrial Average — started teetering on its perch and people suddenly recognized that COVID-19 is truly nasty stuff that could kill millions of people and wreck the economy.

As the Dow plummeted (28.5% since Feb. 21), government at all levels — some would say belatedly — began reading the infection and mortality rates and sounding the alarms. They restricted travel. They sent students home. They ordered restaurants, bars and “non-essential” businesses to close and advised folks to stay home and keep a distance from others if they had to go out. Sports arenas and concert halls fell silent. Business conferences and exhibitions were called off.

The closings, cancellations and cocooning are necessary to save lives, but they are causing massive collateral damage to the economy. There is no precedent for this. The Dow is a good measure of the damage, but the best may be the millions who are filing for unemployment benefits. It turns out nonessential businesses are pretty damn essential to those who work in them.

TV broadcasting, a big cog in our consumer economy, has not been immune, of course. I made the rounds of broadcast executives over the past several days and when I asked about the impact on spot sales, they described business as “tough,” “very, very soft” and “ugly” with nothing much coming in to replace the flood of April cancellations. Most didn’t want to put a percentage on the April decline, although one small-group head with small-market stations said he expected April to be off as much as 7%.

The broadcasters seemed reconciled to the second quarter having been wrecked, but were hopeful that the virus would somehow blow over in the quarter so that the economy and their little part of it could start returning to something approaching normal in the third. They conceded they have no visibility beyond the next month. They have no idea what course the virus will take, what federal and state governments will do next or whether the disruption will morph into a full-blown recession.

Some think it could be worse. The auto industry accounts for the better part of stations’ spot sales in any given year, and one keen observer of the spot market told me the industry is “hanging in there.” The automakers are offering — and advertising — special buyer incentives dredged up from past recessions — deep discounts, deferred and extended payments, 0% financing.

Many dealers are open for business, making deals along with appropriate concessions to the pandemic (online dealing, free delivery of cars to buyers’ homes, solo test drives). And dealers want to stay open. The National Association of Auto Dealers has petitioned the White House to preempt dealers from any state mandates to close, claiming that a good, well-maintained vehicle is vital to keeping the country rolling.

But there is no getting around that the auto industry is going to take a big hit this year and that there is a strong correlation between how many vehicles the industry sells and how much advertising it buys. Last December, NADA forecast the sale of 16.8 million cars and light trucks this year, down 1.2% from 2019.

That’s not going to happen.

Auto sales plummeted this month as the pandemic gripped the nation and the analysts at J.D. Power have calculated that sales for the year will be off 800,000 units assuming a 12-week cycle of pandemic escalation and recovery. And that was the best-case scenario. The medium case (most likely, Power thinks) was 1.7 million and the worst case was 3.1 million.

NBC and its affiliates are also having to deal with the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics, which was to be the gravy on top of the political feast. The NBC affiliates with whom I spoke were not too concerned, figuring it might even be better to have the games in 2021 when there will be little political money to soak up the inventory.

But for NBC it’s not that easy. The network plans to air the Super Bowl and the Beijing Winter Olympics back-to-back in February 2022. One network exec worried that moving the summer games to next summer will make it tougher to sell the Super Bowl and Olympics just half a year later to the same pool of advertisers.

While broadcasters cope with bad news from the sales department, stations cannot expect much relief on the cost side. Producers, reporters, anchors, photogs, techs, syndicators, networks and the electric company — all still need to be paid. In crises, the demands of the newsroom become louder and more insistent and top management typically responds to them. Broadcasters know their duty to keep their communities informed and are apt to spend more, not less, to do it.

What’s the good news?

The political will come. On Wednesday, our reporter Janet Stilson checked in with the trackers of political spending and found that all was well. Kantar/CMAG and BIA assured her that their bullish Bloomberg-adjusted forecasts would hold up. And it’s just not because of the white hot presidential race, said BIA’s Mark Fratrik. “There’s a chance that the Democrats may take over the Senate, so we’ll probably have a lot of third-party buys that will be vying to help elect Democratic candidates.”

Fratrik predicted that political would surpass auto as the No. 1 spot category this year, identifying 14 states where 33% or more of total spot advertising will be political, ranging from Reno, Nev., to Wilmington, N.C., to Bangor, Maine. And he expects that the number of states in that category will grow.

And consider this: If the nation is still in social-distancing mode to some extent his summer and fall, campaign money that might have  gone into rallies and canvassing may be steered into other impersonal tactics like advertising.

The only negative is that Michael Bloomberg seems to be reneging on his promise to spend heavily to chase Trump from the White House. It seems that even he has his limits. In addition to the $500 million plus he spent on advertising, he may have spent another $400 million on offices, travel and staff and all the other things that go into a national campaign. Ouch.

It’s also important to keep in mind that unlike in every other economic disruption, recession, depression that has plagued broadcasters over their long history, they are no longer reliant solely on advertising. They now have a second revenue stream.

Retransmission consent and similar programming payments they receive from the streaming services account for a third of their total revenue. And that revenue is baked into contracts with mostly large, financially sound MVPDs. That provides a lot of cushion and comfort to stations and groups, especially those carrying a lot of debt due to recent buying binges like Sinclair ($12 billion) and Nexstar ($8 billion).

I would also note that viewership of TV is up across the board as one would expect with millions stuck at home. According to comScore, viewership of Big Four network affiliates last week (March 12-20) grew 18.5% over the same week last year. Daytime was up 31.3%; early fringe, 35.2%; prime access, 12.3% and prime, 9.4%. Unfortunately, increasing the supply of rating points doesn’t help much in the absence of demand.

So, 2020 is not turning out as expected. Broadcasters will be hard pressed to deliver on that double-digit growth if the pandemic doesn’t subside and subside fast. Yesterday, Magna Global, the giant media agency, predicted spot will “decline massively,” but still show 1% growth on the year because of the political spend.

We will get a better read on what’s happening over the next several weeks as the big publicly traded station groups issue their first quarter earnings and provide guidance for the second quarter and beyond. The calls with analysts will be must-listen affairs.

Harry A. Jessell is editor at large of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 or here. You can read earlier columns here.

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Harry Jessell

So, what do you know? There was pro football on ABC over the weekend, something we haven’t seen since its corporate cousin ESPN absconded with Monday Night Football in 2006. In the inaugural game of XFL 2.0, the DC Defenders trounced the Seattle Dragons, 31-19, at Audi Field in the Buzzard Point (love that name) neighborhood of Washington.

ESPN/ABC, which along with Fox holds the TV rights to the XFL’s resurrection after 19 years, were blessed with a competitive game and put on a fine show. Having lived in Washington for many years, I rooted for the Defenders and was rewarded with scores on a pick six, a blocked punt and, would you believe, a double reverse flea flicker. When’s the last time Dan Snyder’s sorry crosstown crew pulled off something like that?

It’s what can happen when you have the league, the teams and the network fully cooperating on a broadcast.

And I was not the only one who liked the broadcast. The game averaged 3.3 million viewers peaking not at the beginning, but at the end. That’s what you like to see. Games on Fox, ESPN and FS1 posted similar numbers.

Audi Field was electric, and I don’t mean just the crowd. They had mics on the head coaches and the QBs, they had crews chasing down players as they came off the field and they had cameras in the locker rooms at halftime.

The effect was to reduce the distance between the fans at home and what was happening on the field. It created an intimacy more akin to what you find in televised baseball, tennis or golf.

In the NFL, you don’t get many closeups of unhelmeted players, let alone any clue as to what they might be thinking during the game. In the XFL, the players emerge quickly as real folks due to the relentless sideline coverage. One reporter was practically knocked aside as the Defenders showboated in the endzone after an interception.

When Defenders kicker Tyler Rausa botched a 35-year field goal, he had to face a reporter immediately afterward. You could see he felt bad, but because of that moment I was able to fully enjoy his redemption when he later nailed a 55-yarder.

The funniest thing was Dragons Coach Jim Zorn covering his mouth during his play calls, even though they were being broadcast. Old habits.

The XFL is a production of Vince McMahon, pro wrestling’s answer to Donald Trump, and it’s a mark of his business savvy that he was nowhere to be seen this time around. He turned management and marketing over to sports pros like Commissioner Oliver Luck. Gone were all the wrestling gimmicks that made a joke of the original XFL in 2001 and led to its speedy demise. Not only were there no scantily clad cheerleaders, there were no cheerleaders at all.

“You can throw out the records, there are no record, it’s a clean slate,” crowed game co-announcer Steve Levy as he welcomed viewers with all the enthusiasm he could muster. “If all you know about the XFL is “He Hate Me,” forget about it, long gone. This is the brand spanking new XFL.”

So, what you got in the four games aired Saturday and Sunday was football — basic and unadorned. The teams comprise has-beens and wannabes playing for an average salary of just $5,000 a week. The league has eight teams playing a 10-week schedule plus playoffs that culminate with the championship game on ESPN on April 26.

Like USA Today said, the league is going with innovation rather than gimmicks this time around, reimaging the extra points, the kickoffs and other long-standing rules and practices. The staid NFL could learn a lot from the league.

For kickoffs, the receiving team lines up on the 30-yard line and the defenders just five yards away on the 35. The league is selling it as a safety measure (no more players crashing into each other at top speed). But I can see it leading to more TD returns. The kicking team has only one thin line of defense, if you don’t count the usually tackling-challenged kicker.

And there’s no cheap extra points via the kick. You have to run or pass it in. You get one point if you do so from the two-yard line; two points, if from the five, and three if from the 10. Those two- and three-point options didn’t come into play in the Defender-Dragon game (both teams struggled with the one-pointers), but I can see how they would add a lot of interest at the end of close games and drive gamblers crazy.

The league has also instituted some measures to quicken the pace — an official dedicated to speedy ball placement and a 25-second play clock. I hope the rules committee of the NFL is watching. The game still went over three hours, but somehow it felt faster.

Norm Chad, writing in The Washington Post yesterday, pointed out that America doesn’t need more football. He’s dismissed the new league as “Xtraneous, Xcessive, Xasperating.” He must have missed the Super Bowl, which has metastasized into an overlong, bloated Xcuse for football. You know you’re in trouble when they turn the coin toss into its own mini-event with its own pre-toss ceremony and the commercials overshadow the game for many.

Speaking of advertising, the league has plenty — to start, at least. Last Friday, we reported that ESPN had sold 75% of the inventory for the ESPN and ABC broadcasts and that the percentage was rising quickly. The spots came from top-tier advertisers like Michelob, Mastercard, Comcast Xfinity, Geico and Safeauto. Progressive was the big sponsor and it had its logo painted on the field. ABC got time for Oscars and primetime promos.

I should note that the Defender game looked like lot of fun for the 17,000 who showed up at the relatively tiny 20,000 soccer stadium in D.C.’s Buzzard’s Point. They generated a lot of noise and provided a perfect setting for the broadcast as did the sunshine and moderate temperature. And at just $24 a seat, I think they’ll bring some friends or their kids next time.

Look, I know the history. The odds are the new XFL is going to go bust, despite the impressive opening day ratings and those ad sales. The original XFL and last year’s Alliance of American Football started out strong, but couldn’t sustain the loses as interest from fans and viewers quickly dwindled. The former lasted just one season; the latter called it quits seven games into its 10-game season. Part of the problem is that nobody is going to watch a losing team and we know that four of the eight teams will not make the final four.

But sports is all about upsets. Who doesn’t like to root for the underdog?

Harry A. Jessell is editor at large of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 or here. You can read earlier columns here.

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Patrick McCreery of Meredith said that category could be cannabis, marijuana and the various CBD products, but that no broadcaster wants to “touch it with a 10-foot pole” because of the uncertainty surrounding its legality.

“When I got the keys to my first station, I was told not to lose the license,” he said.

Nexstar stations have turned away cannabis business, said the group’s CEO, Perry Sook. “We are a federally regulated business just like the banks,” he said. “Until it’s deemed OK to do business with these folks, we are at risk.”

McCreery, Sook and their peers are wise to proceed with caution. The cannabis business is fraught with legal and regulatory hazards that could jeopardize their FCC licenses and possibly expose them to criminal charges.

But if broadcasters can get their political game in gear, they might be able to piggyback on legislation now pending in the Senate and create a barrier against legal and regulatory trouble and make it possible to reap cannabis advertising dollars.

When we talk about commercializing cannabis, we are talking about two similar, but different plants — marijuana and hemp. For years, they were lumped together by the feds, but they are now on diverging legal and regulatory paths.

Marijuana contains high levels of THC, the psychoactive compound that gets you high and has certain medical benefits. Hemp has low levels of THC (less than 0.3%), not enough to get you high, but it’s loaded with another compound, CBD, which, if you believe the hype, has all sorts of health benefits when mixed into foods, drinks and topicals.

Fearing what the plants were doing to the youth of America, the feds outlawed both in 1937. Further widening the generation gap, the Nixon Administration in 1970 put them, along with LSD, in the same drug-enforcement category as heroin.

But over the last decade, pot proponents have made tremendous progress in bringing cannabis into the mainstream of American life. Eleven states have now legalized cannabis for recreational use and they and 22 others have approved it for medicinal use.

The problem is that the feds are having a tough time letting go. It’s as if, after all those years of arresting people and putting people in jail for smoking pot, the federal criminal justice system can’t just say “nevermind.”

Producing, distributing and possessing marijuana is still a felony under federal law and that is unlikely to change anytime soon, despite what’s happening at the state level. The congressional votes just don’t seem to be there right now.

However, the Farm Bill of 2018 removed hemp from the federal list of controlled substances, providing a legal pathway for CBDs. Butproducing and marketing hemp-derived CBD products are still subject to a tangle of unsettled regulations involving the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission.

As a result, CBD products are unlikely to generate much advertising in the immediate future.

On Oct. 31, two weeks after the station group exec panel, the USDA took a big step, issuing interim rules governing hemp production as required by the 2018 Farm Act that legalized hemp. The rules should spur the production of hemp and CBD that began on a limited experimental basis with the passage of the 2014 Farm Act.

But communications attorney David Oxenford tells me that CBD advertising will be limited because of regulatory tangle. As he reads the tea leaves, stations in states that have legalized CBD may accept ads from reputable retailers promoting products that are not intended to be ingested, that make no specific health claims and that are not in programs aimed at children.

In other words, they are restricted to advertising CBD skin creams and bath bombs to adults from properly regulated sources. He would advise clients to turn away all spots for CBD-laced tinctures, oils, drinks, foods, supplements, gummies and vapes.

The chief culprit in holding up consumable CBDs is the FDA, which is charged with making sure that products you put in your body are effective and safe. It appears to be in no hurry to approve CBDs for eating, chewing, drinking and smoking, although it recognizes that the internet marketplace is already awash in them.

And the agency has been warning companies that have been marketing such products. “Selling unapproved products with unsubstantiated therapeutic claims is not only a violation of the law, but also can put patients at risk, as these products have not been proven to be safe or effective,” the FDA says on its website.

If cannabis companies can’t clear products with the FDA, they really can’t advertise them.

Today, the cannabis business is a legal and regulatory minefield. Broadcasters and other companies doing business with cannabis companies do so at their own peril. Even those with the best counsel could inadvertently trip one of those mines.

What broadcasters need is a safe harbor that would allow them to accept ads for properly vetted CBD products throughout the country and for marijuana products in states where they are legal without risk.

And there is a way to get one.

The House has passed — and the Senate is actively considering — legislation that would provide such a safe harbor to federally regulated banks doing business with cannabis companies.

To date, the banks have shunned cannabis businesses for the same reason broadcasters have, federal laws and regulatory restrictions. This has been bad not only for the banks, but also for the cannabis industry, its employees and the federal treasury.

At a hearing before the Senate Banking Committee last July, Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) spoke for the legislation. “Without access to the banking system, legal cannabis businesses are forced to operate in the shadows, dealing in large amounts of cash,” he said. “This puts a robbery target on the backs of workers and creates a safety hazard for communities. It can also make it harder to monitor transactions and combat money laundering.

“And getting paid in cash means it’s difficult to get a credit card, prove your income to get a loan, or even keep your personal bank account. That can force workers to turn to shady outfits like payday lenders and check cashing services that charge high fees and interest rates, or trap people in a cycle of debt.”

And it is not lost to anybody in Congress that in an all-cash industry, it is hard to track and collect taxes and regulatory fees.

The legislation (S. 1200), which enjoys bipartisan support, is being driven by the American Banking Association and the budding cannabis industry and, from what I can gather, it has a fair chance of passage, if not this year than early next. Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) has said he wants to move the bill to the president’s desk.

So, I say why not expand the legislation to include broadcasters so they, too, can provide services to cannabis companies — that, is, advertising services — without having to worry about violating some murky law or regulation?

Makes sense to me. All it takes is some clever legislative language and the political will to muscle it into the banking bill. I don’t know if the banks and other advocates would welcome broadcasting horning in on their legislation, but they might. A final push from broadcasters might be all the legislation needs.

I have seen all kinds of research reports on how big the cannabis business is expected to grow over the next several years. The forecasts all run into the tens of billions of dollars.

It’s going to be a highly competitive industry. Marketing and advertising dollars will flow. Getting just a fraction of them would make for a badly needed new ad category for broadcasters.

Harry A. Jessell is editor in chief of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 or here.

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You know what, neither do I.

This evening, at 6:30 p.m. ET, Norah O’Donnell will make her debut as the anchor of the CBS Evening News, and I doubt anybody outside of Black Rock and the O’Donnell family are all that pumped up about it.

Remember the drumroll that Katie Couric got back in 2006. Her first night was preceded by a six-city “listening tour” that ostensibly was intended to inform her management of the news, but was really a promotional tour. (It ended at the summer TV critics confab in Pasadena.)

And in 2006, it was a bigger deal because the evening newscasts were a bigger deal. Cable news had cut deeply into their power and influence, but not yet social media.

What’s more, Couric was going to be stepping in for a true giant of broadcast news — Dan Rather, who, love him or hate him, manned the desk for a quarter century and was a living, breathing link to Walter Cronkite who defined the job of anchor in the sixties and seventies when CBS News’s eminence was unchallenged.

CBS had high hopes for Couric. With all the goodwill accumulated during her run at NBC’s Today, the network believed, she would recapture the ratings that Rather had frittered away and make the CBS Evening News No. 1 again.

But we all know how that ended. Couric walked away in 2011 with CBS more or less in the same place it had been when she started — last.

By contrast, O’Donnell comes at a time when CBS seems to be flailing for a solution to the flagging fortunes of its flagship broadcast.

O’Donnell will be the third anchor that CBS has thrown into the breach since Couric. The other two were Scott Pelley (2011-2017) and Jeff Glor (2017-19). As their short tenures indicate, they were unable to improve CBS’s ratings performance. (Bob Schieffer, Anthony Mason and others have gotten turns during the transitions.)

O’Donnell, 45, certainly has the credentials for the job, having spent one decade at NBC and another at CBS reporting and anchoring in a variety of prominent roles.

I got to know her mostly on CBS This Morning, her base for the past several years, and appreciate how she, Gayle King and, yes, the wayward Charlie Rose strove for a more serious, journalistic rundown and tone than their rivals.

The 45-year-old mother of three checks all the boxes for news anchor — intelligent, articulate, telegenic and empathetic. But the real measure of O’Donnell — or any other anchor — is how they do in covering a crisis when there is no script, emotions are running high and no one is sure what is happening or what might happen next.

We will judge her when those crises inevitably and sadly arise. (She is fortunate that Hurricane Barry spared New Orleans a direct hit. Had it not, O’Donnell might have been forced to scrap her inaugural plans [see below], grab her waders and head for Bourbon Street.)

In interviews last week, O’Donnell and CBS News President Susan Zirinsky talked about how the new CBS Evening News will be better than ever, playing it straight down the middle and excelling not only at breaking news, but also at you-heard-it-hear-first enterprise reporting.

“We want to focus stories where we can add something,” Zirinsky told the Los Angeles Times. “Do I need to give you a story that you’ve heard all day and there isn’t anything new? No, I don’t. Everybody on the planet is getting their news on their phone. What I do is that the stories we bring you are sticky — that the stay with you.”

In the same article, O’Donnell made this pitch: “If you want affirmation, you can turn on a cable channel. If you want information, turn on the CBS Evening News.”

Susan, Norah, I hear you, but you are going to have to show me. My hunch is that the CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell will be the much same show as the CBS Evening News with [fill in the blank].

It has been my experience that the only fix that TV news executives and producers come up with for slack ratings is a new face. If not Couric, then Pelley. If not Pelley, then Glor. And if not Glor, then O’Donnell.

Oh, sometimes they throw in new opening theme music and graphics as if they are going to make a difference.

That’s why I (and a lot of other people, I think) can’t get too worked up about this evening.

I am waiting for one of the networks to break the mold, to actually reformat the evening show, put real money into investigative reporting and present stories in a way that might risk the old audience in the hope of acquiring a larger and younger one.

From everything I’ve heard, that doesn’t sound like where O’Donnell and Zirinsky are going.

I will give them a few points for one significant change. Starting in November, the broadcast will emanate from Washington rather than New York for the first time.

It makes sense. With Trump’s unprecedented ability to upstage just about anything other than a major disaster, rarely do any of the network broadcasts go by without Washington and politics getting ample minutes. Why not be the middle of the action?

The move works for O’Donnell, too. She got her start in DC, she has a home there and knows how the town operates. She will be in the gossip flow and positioned to get the gets.

CBS News is taking full advantage of one of its finest hours to introduce O’Donnell — its coverage of the flight of Apollo 11 50 years ago this week.

In the minds of many baby boomers, the core of the evening news audiences, Cronkite was as much a part of that great national adventure as were Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins.

Winning the trust of the America public is a big part of what CBS is trying to do with the move to O’Donnell, and there is no better way of doing that that aligning yourself with the most trusted man in America.

For the inaugural broadcast this evening, O’Donnell will have on Amazon CEO and space entrepreneur Jeff Bezos and Caroline Kennedy, whose father is credited with winning the space race for America. And tomorrow, O’Donnell will mark the day Apollo 11 blasted off by anchoring from the Kennedy Space Center.

As the final countdown begins, I am skeptical, but you never know.

Maybe Zirinsky and O’Donnell can make as much noise as the Saturn V.

Harry A. Jessell is editor of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 or here.

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My name is Harry Jessell and I’d like the top job at the FCC. I’m a WINNER. Just ask the judges of my sixth-grade science fair. Plus, I actually know where the FCC building is and, more important, how to get there. That’s not as easy as you may think.

I don’t know where the FCC chairman fits in the succession plan should you and other higher-ranking officials get blown up by Muslims or Mexicans, but I want to assure you that I am a native born American. My birth certificate is around here somewhere. I think I saw it in a pile of papers a few years ago.

I am not a Washington insider. That’s for sure. One of the great things about being a journalist is that you can use it as an excuse for not donating money to any political candidate or cause. The savings really pile up over the years.

Like the rest of the federal government, the FCC is a disaster. It’s part of the corrupt Washington establishment and, let’s face it, it’s been run by a bunch of losers for at least the past 40 years. From Wiley to Wheeler, one bulb dimmer than the last. Bad people. Very bad.

With me as chairman, we can make the FCC great again.

I could give you plenty of ideas about how to make the FCC great again, but that’s not the point. The point is simply to make it great so that it is no longer not great like the rest of America.

We will have policies. BIG BOLD ONES. Take net neutrality. It’s got the Washington big thinkers tied up in knots right now. I’ll give it a quick study, and we’ll come out strong either for or against the net because neutrality is for pussies. The Jessell FCC won’t be afraid to take a stand.

I’m also for relaxing the foreign ownership restrictions on media, just so long as they’re not too foreign. Regular foreigners from, let’s say, England and Germany and maybe even France are OK — assuming they lose the accents. But no foreigners from countries with a lot of Arabs or countries nobody even heard of.

And, for god’s sake, no Mexicans. You put a Mexican in charge of a radio station, no pretty lady would be safe and piñatas full of drugs would hang from the ceilings — pot! coke! pills! It would be like radio in the ’60s all over again.

And let me just add, Mexicans are wonderful, wonderful people. I love them.

I pledge to use the power of my office evenhandedly, except for those bastards at Comcast/NBCU and Univision who dumped you and your Miss Universe pageant just because you had the cojones to tell it like it is about how Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists.

There must be a thousand ways we can screw Comcast. Suffice it to say, Brian Roberts won’t be able to merge with I-95 on a Sunday morning.

As for Univision, I’m thinking we should have a rule that all broadcasts be in English (let’s see how they do competing with the big boys) and a code of conduct for uppity reporters at presidential pressers backed by stiff penalties (water-boarding?).

And the New York TV stations will pay for hanging you out to dry when you said you saw thousands of Muslims celebrating the 9/11 attacks in the streets of Jersey City. It they don’t turn over the tapes, I will go after them like Black Jack Pershing at a mass Muslim execution.

The great thing about broadcasting is, if you don’t like what the networks or stations say, you don’t have to sue them for libel. You can just jerk them around all day long because they actually need a license from us to be in business. Dick Nixon knew how to pull those levers and he wasn’t half the man you are.

As the great, ever-quotable Benito Mussolini once said, “Let us have a dagger between our teeth, a bomb in our hands, and an infinite scorn in our hearts.” (Not that it should matter, but Benito and I share a birthday!)

You may be afraid that your harsh talk and bullying will put off some people in Washington. Don’t worry. I know that town. All’s forgiven once The Plum Book comes out.

Already, some Republican regulars are lining up behind you because they see you for what you are — A WINNER! My governor, Chris Christie, that big teddy bear of a lapdog, was first in line.

We will have to find a couple of Republican rubber stamps so I don’t have to waste time politicking in my own agency. The FCC could serve as a dumping ground for your “disavowed” white supremacists.

We will have to have a couple of Democrats on the commission, but that doesn’t mean we have to pay for their staff. If they want to trash us, they’ll have to write their own speeches and dissenting statements.

And I don’t see anything in the Comm Act of ’34 that says we have to live with them. Let’s see how they function from a strip mall in Herndon with NO STARBUCKS.

I will make loosening the FCC indecency rules a top priority. So, if you want to tell all those pundits who dismissed you as a clown last summer to “go fuck yourselves and your mamas” in your inaugural address, you go right ahead. Any complaints will fall on deaf ears.

Along with the appointment, I ask for just one thing. Could we move the FCC to within walking distance of some of those fancy expense-account restaurants? When I tell the Washington establishment types that I ain’t playing ball with them, I want to do it over a decent meal.

Sincerely,

Harry

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