Broadcast Band Bullshit

This commentary was a response to a commentary published by Patrick Maines, executive director of the Media Institute, in the Huffington Post.

Patrick Maines is a paid lobbyist for the broadcast industry, but, unlike most lobbyists, one paid for at taxpayer expense because the Media Institute is registered as a non-profit, so the lobbying expense is tax deductible. One way that Maines earns his keep is to serve as a bully boy for the broadcast industry.  The folks who control local TV and radio news hide anonymously behind rocks while cheering Maines on to do the stone throwing.  The politicians, who know who are behind those rocks, all get the message, so Maines is well worth the broadcasters’ money.

The stone throwing is, of course, to be expected from Maines. But what is over-the-top for me is his accusation that Hundt acts “clandestinely.”  This is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.  Over the years I many times tried to attend the Media Institute’s taxpayer funded events on behalf of the broadcasting industry.  I was always told “no.”  Even our partisan think tanks open the doors to the public without regard to ideology–but not the secretive broadcast industry, which has always operated on the principle that the less the public knows about its lobbying activities and its economic self interest, the better.

And for Maines to accuse the FCC of playing industry favorites when the broadcasting industry has always made that a centerpiece of its lobbying campaigns for government handouts worth tens of billions of dollars (think “preserving free TV”).  Well, such an argument is absolutely shameless.

Note that I don’t dispute Maines’s sincere interest in pushing First Amendment and pro-competition agendas.  But when the broadcast industry’s economic self-interest and lobbying agenda come in conflict with First Amendment and pro-competitive values–as they often do–Maines has consistently revealed his hand by either remaining quiet or pretending that the conflict doesn’t exist. The fact is, Hundt has been more of a champion of the Media Institute’s self-proclaimed values than the Media Institute itself.

An additional caveat is that when I say the “broadcast industry” I don’t literally mean just the broadcast industry.  What I mean is “broadcast related.”  Just as companies often expect their vendors, such as lawyers, to chip in with campaign contributions, broadcasters expect their vendors to do the same and their vendors have a long track record of doing so.  Go to the the annual NAB Show, and you’ll see the reason for this you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-your-back synergy.  My guess is that at least 80% of the Media Institute’s money is broadcast related.

BBB News Service
April 1, 2010 Thursday

SUBJECT: Recorded conversation on February 25, 2010 between FCC Chair Julius Genachowski and NAB President Gordon Smith concerning the FCC’s Broadband Plan, to be released March 15, 2010.

LOCATION: National Association of Broadcasters Headquarters, 1771 N Street NW, Washington DC 20036

Genachowski: How are you?

Smith:  Good to see you.

Genachowski: The Trail Blazers are doing great this year.  I bet you’re pleased.

Smith: Yeah, it’s nice to have a winning hometown team.

Genachowski:  And it’s even better to have a winning trade association!

Smith: You bet!

Genachowski:  If you had a choice, would you take your old job back in the U.S. Senate?

Smith:  I’m happy where I am.  Actually, my current job isn’t much different.

Genachowski: How so?

Smith: Well, I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t.  (Pause).  Look, I can trust you, right?

Genachowski: Yes, the last thing I want is to have you guys after me! (laughs).

Smith: Well, the truth is, leading the NAB is very much like being a U.S. senator from Oregon.  After all, why do you think they selected me?  This is a political job.

Genachowski: I bet you didn’t meet as many TV celebrities on Capitol Hill.

Smith: Yes, that’s true, too! (laughs).

Genachowski: I cannot flip my fingers and get a meeting with Meet the Press’s David Gregory.

Smith:  He’s speaking next week at the NAB state leadership conference, just before my grassroots crew blitzes the Hill.

Genachowski: I know.  I feel a little like Custer at the Alamo.  (laughs).

Smith: (laughs).  That’s just the way we want it.  (Pause).  So let’s get down to business.  What’s this talk about the broadcast band being the oxygen of mobile broadcast service?

Genachowski:  I didn’t say that.  What I said was that spectrum—our airwaves–is the oxygen of mobile broadcast service.  Look, America is facing a looming spectrum crunch, and this is a great opportunity for the broadcast industry.

Smith:  Okay, tell me about your Broadband Plan.  My team hasn’t seen it.

Genachowski: It’s a win-win-win.  Broadcasters win, the government wins, and the public wins.  We’re going to propose that 120 MHz of spectrum currently allocated to broadcasting be reallocated to mobile broadband and auctioned.  But here’s the kicker.  We’re going to make the auction voluntary for FCC license holders, and they’ll get the lion’s share of the auction receipts.

Smith:  Who says?

Genachowski: Well, we’re going to leave that part of the plan vague.  Leave it up to Congress to choose the proportion of auction receipts that go to broadcasters versus the public.  And we all know what Congress will do!  (laughs).

Smith:  This is not a laughing matter.  You’re talking about my members’ bread and butter.

Genachowski: (stops laughing).

Smith: Your approach is wrong.  Yeah, Congress is not going to stiff the broadcasters.  But it will also never agree to such a blatant giveaway to some of the wealthiest individuals and corporations in America.  You’re talking about a giveaway that could make Cash for Clunkers and GM’s bailout look like petty cash.  And for some of the most profitable companies in
America: Disney-ABC, GE-NBC, Viacom-CBS, and Fox.  What are you thinking?

Genachowski:  Look, the broadband plan makes no mention of spectrum windfalls.  I was very careful only to mention the positive aspects of the voluntary auction.  That’s why I always call my proposal a win-win-win.

Smith: I wasn’t born yesterday.

Genachowski:  You’re reading way too much into this.   When it comes to mobile broadband, our goal is clear: To benefit all Americans and promote our global competitiveness, the U.S. must have the fastest, most robust, and most extensive mobile broadband networks, and the most innovative mobile broadband marketplace in the world.  There is not one thoughtful observer who doesn’t agree with this goal and recognize that the only politically feasible way to convert broadcast spectrum into mobile broadband spectrum is to give broadcasters an incentive to make the transition.  Everyone recognizes the social benefits from converting broadcast to broadband are immense.  We’ve got the entire public interest community behind us in this!  There is no controversy!

Smith: What about the press?

Genachowski:  You mean your members?  I just cannot believe your members will give you a problem.  Your members control not only the radio and broadcast media but most of the major newspapers: the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, U.S.A. Today.  It would be suicidal for them—unprecedented—to give Congress a hard time on this.

Smith: You’re wrong.  There will be negative op-eds.   Members of Congress won’t like it.

Genachowski: So how should the FCC proceed?

Smith:  Congress isn’t going to object to giving us a spectrum windfall.  They just want it done right, which means you’ve got to give them political cover.  Recall the great spectrum giveaway in the Telecom Act of 1996.  Congress told the American public broadcasters weren’t getting any more spectrum, that all we were getting was a minor modification to our license, allowing us to offer a single HD channel instead of our traditional SD channel.  Congress conveniently didn’t mention that we were getting the right, for every SD channel we currently had, to provide an additional dozen SD channels or fifty mobile TV channels.  For the temporary loaned digital channel, Congress claimed it wasn’t a giveaway but a giveback; that at the end of the DTV transition the broadcasters would give back the spectrum they were loaned to make the transition.  Nobody told the American public that during the intervening years we’d constantly renegotiate the deal, whittling down the amount of returned spectrum, from 158 MHz to 102 Mhz, and the quality of returned spectrum, letting us pick the best of our original or loaned channel, and then holding out for billions of additional subsidies, including billions of dollars in equipment subsidies for our customers.

Genachowski: I don’t see how that strategy can work here.

Smith: Certainly, if you ask for an auction, you’ve got to bring in Congress.  Otherwise, one of our competitors will sue you for violating the spectrum windfall clause in the Communications Act and the many other Congressional statutes banning windfalls to public companies.  But the solution is simple.  Give us what we want through minor modifications of our licenses.  That’s the way it’s always been done.  That’s the way Congress likes it.

Genachowski:  But that’s too slow a process.  I want this complete by 2015.

Smith: My boy, we’re almost there, just be a bit patient.  In the last five years the FCC, with Congressional approval, allowed us to transition from site based licensing to geographic service area licensing, so we can now use a local cellular architecture to broadcast rather than a single giant tower.  And you also allowed us to abandon HDTV and create a new mobile TV standard built into cell phones that can provide TV, voice, data—whatever—and use the cell phone for the return link.  Doesn’t that already sound an awful lot like mobile broadband?  You bet.  Those free rights were worth more than $10 billion to us. Not only that, they’ll turn those new converter boxes the government just paid for into obsolete equipment faster than Windows 7 rendered your Windows 2000 computer into a doorstop.  And we did it with not a pipsqueak from Congress, the FCC, any influential public interest group, or the press itself.  That’s what Congress expects from you, and that’s what we expect from you.

Genachowski:  Okay, I hear you.

Smith: Now I don’t want to suggest that your plan is bad.  You’ve gotten Congress’s attention.  They won’t do the straight-out auction, but they will give you political cover so you can complete the regulatory transition from broadcast to broadband, where the money is.  Just listen to Dingell, Markey, Boucher, Rockefeller, and the other leaders.  They’re masters at this game.  You just follow their cue.

Genachowski:  But the auction proposal?

Smith: No need to worry.  Your spectrum inventory proposal will do the trick.   Congress will tell you to do the spectrum inventory first.  That will give us three to four years to continue our policy of saving broadcasting by killing it.  By then, our mobile broadcasting—did I say broadband?–business will be established, including popular interactive services.  Why then go through the effort of holding an auction for rights that we already possess?

Genachowski:  Tonight I’m giving a media award at the Kennedy Center to Newton Minow.  I’m going to call him a national treasure; I’m going to observe that people remember him for turning the most memorable phrase in communications policy history—the declaration that television was a vast wasteland; and I’m going to opine that for decades FCC chairman have been trying to one-up him and all have failed.  But what I’m really going to be thinking about in front of that audience is that I hope to be remembered for turning the vast wasteland into a vast giveaway that allowed the broadband age to finally come to America.  (laughs).

Smith: (laughs).

Genachowski:  What’s that copy of Orwell’s 1984 doing on your desk?

Smith: My favorite book.

Genachowski: Mine, too.  There is no better preparation for serving as an FCC Chair. (laughs)

Smith: (laughs).

GEOGRAPHIC: DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

LOAD-DATE: April 1, 2010

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Transcript

Copyright 2010 BBB News Service, Inc.
All Rights Reserved

Representative Cliff Stearns:  “The plans seeks to make 500 MHz of spectrum available for wireless broadband within ten years.  That’s good,  so long as the FCC does not give the spectrum away or rig auctions with conditions, then we’ll advance our broadband goals while generating needed federal revenue.   I hope that the broadband spectrum on the part of the broadcasters will be looked at carefully and that if they have to relinguish anything it will be on a voluntary basis.”

–Opening statement of Representative Cliff Stearns, Hearing of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, “Oversight of the Federal Communications Commission: The National Broadband Plan,”March 25, 2010, at 22:40 (27:10).

Usually when politicians speak out of both sides of their mouth, they do so at different times and in front of different audiences.  Here, representative Cliff Stearns, the ranking minority member of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, does it in sequential sentences in his opening remarks at his subcommittee’s oversight hearing on the FCC’s broadband plan.  It’s a testament to the shallow telecom reporting and widespread indifference to such inconsistencies that Stearns would feel comfortable publicly posing as a defender of the public purse while, in effect, championing a giveaway of tens of billions of dollars of public assets to the broadcast industry.

[This is a commentary on Bruce Kushnick's article in the March 16, 2010 Nieman Watchdog: How the FCC's exciting new broadband plan is a fraud.]

Representative John Dingell:  “I have great concerns about several of the plan’s recommendations about spectrum reallocation….   At best, these are ancillary to Congress’s intent to expand broadband access.   At worst, they would reinstitute the old policy debates long since satisfactorily settled….  In conclusion, Mr. Chairman, I would like to remind the witnesses today that Congress is the sole progenitor of the Commission’s authority.  To quote Sam Rayburn, if the Commission remembers it works for us, everything will turn out fine.”

–Opening statement of Representative John Dingell, Hearing of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, “Oversight of the Federal Communications Commission: The National Broadband Plan,”March 25, 2010, at 34:20.

In his otherwise fine article, Bruce Kushnick errs in crediting too much power to the FCC.  The FCC is a creature of Congress, and Congress keeps it on a very short leash.  The problem, therefore, is not the FCC, but Congress.  Congress wants the FCC to be overwhelmingly pro-incumbent, so that’s what the FCC does.  FCC officials who aren’t suicidal have very little choice in the matter.  Unfortunately, Congress generally exercises its power over the FCC in ways that aren’t transparent, so it’s hard for the press and the public to hold members of Congress accountable, say, for giving incumbents windfalls at public expense worth tens of billions of dollars.

Here is a simple test about whether any think tank or advocacy group is serious about broadband corruption.  I call it the John Dingell test, after U.S. Rep. John Dingell.  Any group not willing to publicly finger John Dingell as a prominent source of multi-billion dollar taxpayer ripoffs–the Jack Abramoff of telecom corruption, but much, much worse given the money and stakes involved–doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.

I’ll admit that it’s a bit unfair to go after Dingell because so many other members of Congress are also implicated.  But Dingell is the longest serving member of Congress, a longtime chair of the House Commerce Committee with jurisdiction over the FCC, the man responsible for appointing and reappointing the worst and longest serving FCC commissioner in the history of the FCC (Jim Quello), and he’s still shamelessly and effectively doing his dirty work on behalf of incumbents.

The reason the John Dingell test is so effective is that most telecom groups, even those with the noblest pedigrees, hate going after members of Congress, especially powerful ones of the same party (although partisan politics is remarkably unimportant on telecom issues), because it burns bridges.  Such members of Congress and their friends have incredibly valuable perks to give out to any group that wants to be an effective public advocate, so it’s suicidal to go after somebody like Dingell.

Thus, it might be said that it’s unfair to blame either FCC officials or public interest groups because to blame them is, in effect, to ask them to commit suicide, which most reasonable people would probably view as an unreasonable thing to ask of anyone.  From their perspective, they’re doing the best they can under impossible conditions.

To recap, let’s not attack the FCC or public interest groups too much.  They’re more victims of a corrupt system than causes of it.

I’ve been following public policy debates over the TV broadcast band for several decades and have often been amazed by how much of it is bullshit and how so many insiders know that it is bullshit but never publicly call it out.  By bullshit I don’t mean lying, which assumes that a person knows or cares about the truth.  As Harry Frankfurt writes in On Bullshit, “It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as the essence of bullshit.”

The parable of the Emperor’s New Clothes captures the central political logic of bullshit.  All the adults (read members of Congress and FCC officials) know that the assertion that the emperor (read broadcast lobby) is wearing clothes (are intellectually serious in their claims) is bullshit, but it isn’t in their self-interest to call this out publicly.  Given the terror with which members of Congress and other politicians view their local broadcasters, who control their message and the message of their opponents, the analogy to an emperor appears apt.

However, the analogy breaks down in two ways.  First, it downplays how much valuable information about power rather than truth the bullshit can convey.  The broadcast bullshitter is actually providing policymakers with extremely useful information, just not necessarily about the truth.  The bullshit functions as code to tell policymakers what fault lines they must not cross and what public arguments they must not use if they want to continue in office.   This is useful stuff, which helps explain why policymakers have an endless appetite for such bullshit.

Second, the analogy assumes that the bullshit is self-evident to an uninformed observer such as the child.  A closer analogy might be shrewd lobbyists who listen with effusive admiration to a U.S. Congressman spouting one insincere platitude after another.  Here the observant child would need background information to detect the bullshit.

This blog aims to provide that background information.  I intend to post on it rarely–only when the bullshit meter has moved far into the red zone.  Many months may go by without a post.  But if there is one thing I’ve learned from studying broadcast band politics over the decades, broadcasters will continue to dish out this bullshit as long as Congressional and FCC policymakers have an endless appetite to consume it.

Despite the above, I hope to release several bullshit analyses per week leading up to the FCC’s February release of its broadband plan.  Here is the current agenda.  The first two analyses accompany the launch of this blog.

[April 1, 2010 update: Obviously, I didn't follow through with my original game plan to release bullshit analyses; I decided that a more conventional article approach would be more interesting to potential readers.]

1)      Free TV is free.

2)      Broadcast TV is efficient.

3)      TV broadcasters are committed to TV broadcasting.

4)      Broadcast TV is a technology leader.

5)      The best way to save broadcast TV is to kill it.

6)      TV broadcasters will sacrifice profits to protect consumer investment in broadcast TV equipment.

7)      TV broadcasters object to FCC official Stuart Benjamin’s arguments based on economic reasoning.

8)      TV broadcasters provide close to $10 billion in public service announcements each year as public compensation for their spectrum.

9)      TV broadcasters provide a meaningfully “local” service based on the information needs of a democracy.

10)  TV broadcasters want to engage in a serious discussion about the future of the broadcast TV band.

For my earlier writings on the politics of the broadcast band, including my book, Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick: How Local Broadcasters Exert Political Power, see the entries on the side of this blog.

–J. H. Snider

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