Broadcasters look to FCC’s media agenda

Increasingly a target this year as the administration looks to repurpose TV airwaves, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) is making a heightened push to register its spectrum arguments as critical to the FCC’s lagging media agenda.

According to ex parte filings, the group has met five times with FCC officials this month to add to the agency’s stagnant “Future of Media” project, which seeks to promote local and diverse media but has yet to even issue a report. The NAB had registered only two meetings in this proceeding the year before.

NAB’s early-Feburary focus on this proceeding included meetings with with FCC Commissioners Robert McDowell, Michael Copps, Mignon Clyburn, Meredith Attwell Baker, and advisors to the FCC chairman, Rick Kaplan and Eddie Lazarus.

“During the meeting, we discussed legal issues affecting broadcasters’ continuing role as the leading providers of local news and information, entertainment, and other innovative content and services. First, with regard to spectrum policy, we noted the importance of both broadcasting and broadband to America’s communications future,” one of the ex partes said.

This effort comes as wireless and technology companies paint the lobby as obstructive to the future of the Internet, which they say depends on repurposing TV airwaves for mobile broadband. 

The NAB has long said that policies that hurt local radio and television stations are a set-back to community-based, diverse news. In the spectrum fight, broadcasters are stressing the innovative new ways they are delivering media.

“We are on reinventing our broadcasting right now with creative uses of the DTV spectrum (with free HDTV, live and local mobile DTV on cellphones, laptops, etc),” said NAB executive communications vice president, Dennis Wharton.

Whether the media docket can be much help to the broadcasters is another question. The FCC chairman has rarely mentioned the media proceeding in recent weeks. It flared up in a few news reports last year as a potential inroad for the government to tamper with news, but has since fallen off the radar. Media reform remains a top priority for Democratic Commissioner Copps.

Broadcasters say they do not oppose spectrum auctions, which would transfer TV airwaves to mobile companies, as long as the auctions truly voluntary. “Our main point is that this is not an either/or proposition. The notion that you have to threaten free and local broadcasting to have a vibrant broadband world is a complete fallacy,” Wharton said.