Over the past week, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has bombarded Congress with a flurry of doomsday pronouncements, claiming broadcast television is under attack by the FCC and advocates seeking to open unused TV channels (TV white spaces) for wireless broadband and mobile Wi-Fi devices.
If all of this sounds a bit familar, that is because the NAB used a similar argument in 1974 to try and kill off a nascent service called cable television and poured millions of dollars into a campaign to "Save Free TV." Thanks to YouTube we have this little advertising gem that appeared in movie theaters throughout the country.
Now in 2008, the NAB and broadcaster lobby is at it again, attacking another nascent service, except this one is in their backyard. And as history shows, broadcasters don't like others playing in their backyard. Rather, they have reserved their most vehement and underhanded attacks to maintain their exclusive control of the valuable, but massively underutilized, broadcast spectrum. As former New York Times media reporter and author Joel Brinkley observed: “Above all else, [broadcasters hold] sacred the eleventh commandment: Thou Shalt Not Give Up Spectrum.”
In The Lobby that Cried Wolf, New America provides a glimpse of broadcasters' lobbying path of destruction, highlighting recent NAB campaigns to keep others out of their spectrum and providing parallels with the current campaign against white space devices.
Since 2004, the FCC has been considering opening unused television guard band channels, commonly referred to as the TV “white spaces,” for unlicensed wireless networks and devices. Throughout the FCC’s deliberation and testing process, broadcasters have followed a familiar script of scare tactics and half-truths, attempting to paint a picture of white space devices as detrimental to television reception and as a threat to everything from the DTV transition to heart monitors.
As the FCC recently announced its intention to move forward with establishing operational rules for white space devices, the broadcast lobby has ramped up its attacks. An article from the editor of TVNewsday last week opined, "Permitting unlicensed devices into white space will wreak havoc in the band." Such tales of gloom and doom should be a patented trademark of the NAB.
In 1998, the FCC proposed the creation of a new class of low-power FM (LPFM) community radio stations. In predictable fashion, the NAB attacked the idea asserting that such stations would "create small islands of usable coverage in an ocean of interference." One broadcaster said the idea would "cause chaos beyond belief" and the New Jersey Broadcaster Association offered the new LPFM service "has the potential to destroy the very fabric of our broadcasting system." After the FCC approved the new service, the NAB told Congress "this is a prescription for chaos on the airwaves."
The credibility of such statements should be suspect merely for their dramatics. Nonetheless, similar exaggerations and falsehoods have derailed even the most technically sound proposals. From LPFM, to low-power television, and wireless microphones, broadcasters have again and again predicted similar interference nightmares. And again and again, broadcasters’ claims of interference have turned out to be exaggerated or false. Today there are more than 836 low-power FM stations, 2,900 low-power TV stations and more than 400,000 wireless microphones operating throughout the TV band on an unlicensed basis, and despite the NAB's pronouncements, chaos did not ensue.
In the Aesop fable, the boy who cried wolf too many times had his flock eaten or was eaten himself by the wolf (depending upon the telling). Unfortunately, many policymakers have not generally viewed broadcasters' pronouncements with the same level skepticism as the villagers in the fable. Maybe there memories are just too short.
You can read a copy of the paper here.
