HDTV Spells Ripoff

By William Lucy

A lot of us can't understand the difference between analog and digital, but every one of us can understand getting mugged. Right now the networks and the big broadcasters -- outfits like Disney and Fox and Westinghouse and General Electric -- are trying to mug us to the tune of as much as $100 billion.

It's just another example of how corporations are trying to pull the levers of power to their own advantage -- and leaving working Americans to pay the price. Here's what's happening.

In 1927, in radio's infancy, Congress, pushed along by Republican Pres. Herbert Hoover, created the Federal Communications Commission to regulate the public airwaves. The FCC assigns channels to broadcasters and sets up a few simple rules. For example, broadcasters have to set aside a small amount of time for "public service" programming, which they tend to schedule at 3:30 a.m.

A few years back, worried that the Japanese were going to be the first to develop high-definition TV (HDTV) -- a TV picture as sharp as a photo -- the government gave each commercial TV broadcaster an extra channel to experiment with. The deal was that once HDTV was in blossom, the broadcaster would give back its original channel.

Commercial television broadcasters use "analog" technology. The information they broadcast is broken into chunks, like sugar cubes. But in the midst of the effort to develop HDTV, scientists found a way to make one ordinary channel do the work of six or seven by "digitalizing" data -- by breaking it into tiny pieces, like granulated sugar. Digitalizing compresses data so much that one analog channel can become six or seven digital TV channels, or 72 high-quality radio signals, or can be mixed and matched to carry phone service, cell phones, computer data, faxes and more.

License-holders quickly realized they were sitting on diamond mines. Lobbyists for the broadcasters and consumer electronics manufacturers salivating at the prospect of the market for expensive digital TV sets swarmed all over the Gingrich-Dole Congress. The fruit of their efforts was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which requires the FCC to award licenses for the new digital channels only to -- guess who -- current holders of TV broadcast licenses.

The FCC held hearings which were about as open as a CIA strategy session, and now it plans to let the big boys keep what the government lent them, and not pay a nickel for it. FCC Chair Reed Hundt is quoted as saying the commission's proposed plan would be "the biggest single gift of public property to any industry in this century."

It's up to Congress to tell the FCC: "Don't give those channels away. Auction them off to the highest bidder." That's not only fair; it's just good sense: Current estimates are that an auction would bring the government up to $100 billion.

What could the public do with that $100 billion? For a start it would begin to repair the damage caused by greed: the poor children who can't get health care, the poor who are forced to displace public employees, the loss of access to childcare for the working poor, the toxic dumps that poison poor neighborhoods, the emasculation of occupational safety and health and environmental inspections and enforcement, the cuts in food stamps, the slash-and-burn approach to job training programs, the loss of help to workers laid off when a corporation moves its plant to Mexico. That's just a small sampling.

But a fair and open auction is the last thing that the major broadcast corporations want; that would be like taking away their key to Fort Knox. This $100 billion holdup would come on top of the $400 billion or so a year that corporations already get from the government in giveaways and tax breaks.

There are few times in this country's history when money and public policy have been so interwoven, when so much of America's social and economic future depends on the money we earmark to rebuild the infrastructure and promote jobs, to retrain workers, and to help kids get to college.

The broadcasters' plot to steal the public airwaves is still another reminder that corporate welfare and gold-plated corporate executives are bleeding America like leeches. And if they get their way in this case, you can start putting money aside to buy that $1,500 set you'll need to get digital TV.