Having served as president of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association during the tumultuous 1990s and now taking a turn as chairman of the trade association and as a director of Comcast, Decker Anstrom may forever be perceived as a cable guy.

But he is far more than that. As president and COO of Landmark Communications, a privately held company based in Norfolk, Va., he is also a broadcaster (Landmark owns two CBS affiliates, KLAS Las Vegas and WTVF Nashville); newspaper publisher (most notably the Virginian-Pilot of Roanoke, Va.); cable programmer (The Weather Channel) and, perhaps more important these days, an online operator.

With the popular weather.com, companion sites for the newspapers and TV stations and a growing portfolio of classified sites, Landmark's online business now accounts for more than 20 percent of the company's revenue.

Contributing Editor Marianne Paskowski caught up with him recently to discuss a panoply of issues, including why Landmark is not buying TV stations or selling the Weather Channel, as well as to get his latest take on government regulation and reform.

An edited transcript follows.

Let's start with retransmission consent. Are your deals for the two TV stations done?

Yes they are.

Did you get money or, in-kind value?

I can't really comment on that.

Do you sense that resistance from cable operators to paying retransmission fees is lessening? I don't, because most of the action is likely to take place next year.

There's still significant resistance to pay for otherwise free over-the-air signals and I would expect that they'll continue to be tough negotiations going forward.

You are this year's chairman of the NCTA. Do you expect the organization to try to change or amend or alter the retransmission laws?

We're on record as indicating that we believe that the retransmission laws should be reformed and have specifically identified several lead areas, some potentially unfair practices. There's a further review going on inside the NCTA, and I would expect that there will be more details to follow as we move into the next session of Congress.

It's been 15 years since the '92 act passed, so it's an appropriate time to step back and look at retransmission consent. And, frankly, to look at it in conjunction with [must carry]—the heads-I-win, tails-I-win solution that the broadcasters convinced Congress to adopt in 1992.

Do you personally favor retransmission concept?

Retransmission consent is a fair policy. A copyright holder or a content owner who's invested significantly in their product should have the right to determine how and if they're going to distribute it. That is a sound policy. If it's good for cable networks, it's good for broadcasters and other content holders.

What's appropriate to look at with respect to retransmission consent is, first of all, the double benefit of retransmission consent plus must carry that provides an unnatural and an unfair safety net for many broadcasters, and frankly, an unnecessary one.

Let's take it one step further and talk about FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. Is he still pushing for digital must carry and can he possibly succeed?

Of course, the commission voted an order several weeks ago that largely followed the NCTA's voluntary plan that would call for a three-year period of so-called rule must carry in which the cable operators carry both the analog and the digital signal. The industry generally has been agreeable to that as an interim step to manage the transition. It was what was going to happen anyway, and clearly the cable operators have a huge stake in making sure that their customers have access to either the digital or analog signal depending on what kind of set-top box they have.

So it's tied in with the digital transition?

Absolutely, but our firm view is that it should sunset after three years or so and certainly the discussion at the meeting was very clear that this is a three-year period. It was a good step by the cable industry to work constructively with Chairman Martin, as well as with the other four commissioners, saying, Look, we'll give a little here in terms of our historic opposition to must carry in order to make sure that our customers are really well served. But there should be an end point.

Switching gears, there are a lot of TV stations for sale and you haven't been a buyer.

No. We like the broadcast television business. We have two great stations. They're well run. We've got great executives running them. They're profitable, they're growing and, in a different world, we might be a buyer. But the reality is that the multiples are very high for what one would chart in a realistic growth of capital forward. So, going forward, we are not a buyer for stations.

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