Here’s a question for you: How much do commercial TV stations pay for the privilege of monopolizing the airwaves? The answer’s a grabber. Although television is a highly profitable business and the airwaves are public property in limited supply, a license to operate on them costs nothing. In fact, according to the media watch group Free Press, we’re giving away the use of an asset that’s been valued at $367 billion nationwide, and the major beneficiaries of our largesse are a handful of large station owners including companies like Viacom, Disney, Time Warner, and News Corp. At a conference on the future of public television held by the University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center at the MCA last week, this free ride merited a full jowl shake from local broadcast icon John Callaway, who called for the American people to “get outraged” about it and “rise up.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
What’s that got to do with the future of public television, which (never mind those 30-second underwriting spots) is noncommercial? Everything, according to the mavens at the conference. Right now broadcasting’s on the cusp of something big–“the greatest change since the introduction of television,” says Corporation for Public Broadcasting president Kathleen Cox–and as a result your television set is as good as dead. Over-the-air broadcasters are going digital and eventually will turn off the analog transmission most sets were built to receive. The original government deadline for pulling the plug on analog was December 31, 2006. Now the date’s getting nudged farther into the future, but in spite of an apparent lack of public demand (no e-mail campaigns from citizens eager to toss their TVs out the window), it’s going to happen. The FCC says digital broadcast will give those with DTV sets a sharper, interference-free picture along with a bunch more channels. People who don’t have DTV sets will be able to get something like their old picture with a converter, and if they can’t afford a converter, the government may spend a few billion supplying them. But the big bonanza will go to the stations, which will get as many as six digital channels for every analog channel they have now, and of course to the manufacturers and distributors of digital TV sets and converters. Though it’s currently planning to give the digital channels away, the government is hoping to get the analog channels back and sell them to businesses for use in wireless communications.
WTTW president Dan Schmidt was one of many speakers who said the salvation for public broadcasting stations rests in “bonding with the community through local programming.” Very little of such stuff is now done, however–according to Auletta, only 16 of 349 PBS affiliates air nightly local public-affairs programs–probably because it doesn’t travel well. And local media watchers were on hand to dispute the impression that WTTW (aka Winnetka Talks to Wilmette) has been practicing what it preaches. Karen Bond of the grassroots organization Chicago Media Action, which this summer issued a quantitative analysis of Chicago Tonight charging that it “ignores news and perspectives of interest to…communities of color and the working class,” observed that “we don’t feel like we’re part of the process. There’s no mechanism whereby people that are supposed to be served by the station have input that would be binding.”
