POLITE APPLAUSE FOR NAB, RASPBERRY FOR FCC

We here at TVNEWSDAY are giving the NAB a polite round of applause for its performance in softening the impact of the FCC’s order mandating DTV PSAs.

The order is fairly tough. TV stations must air 16 30-second PSAs and 16 crawls, snipes or tickers each week educating folks about the digital transition and the cut off of analog service at midnight on Feb. 17, 2009.

The PSAs must be broadcast when people are actually awake and include closed captions.

Broadcasters must also air a 30-minute program explaining the DTV transition at least once and, starting Nov. 10, air a countdown graphic showing how many days left to the analog cut-off at least once per day. The graphic must appear on screen for five to 15 seconds.

Finally, broadcasters must also make quarterly reports to the commission certifying precisely what they have done.

As I said, the order is tough, but could have been worse.

The plan is essentially one that the NAB cobbled together and persuaded the FCC to adopt as an alternative to the far more onerous one that the bureaucrats had developed.

The cornerstone of the FCC plan is the requirement that broadcasters after Oct. 1 air 12 15-second PSAs and 12 60-second crawls per day, although a quarter of them could be air during the wee hours.

That FCC plan, by the way, is still in the FCC order as an option available to any broadcaster who is crazy enough to sacrifice more inventory on the altar of DTV.

So, why just polite applause for the NAB effort?

Because there should be no PSAs mandates at all.

An earlier, more effective lobbying effort might have derailed the whole FCC initiative.

Last year, the NAB spent a ton of money to hire staff and develop a comprehensive voluntary educational DTV campaign. It was impressive. It was intended to obviate FCC rules. The NAB just couldn’t sell it to the FCC or to the key Hill players.

It’s not entirely NAB’s fault.

Each of the big station groups needed to step up with promises to air a certain number of PSAs throughout the day, including primetime. Those commitments never came. Without them, the NAB voluntary campaign began taking on a certain smoke-and-mirrors quality.

Now, broadcasters are stuck with the PSA obligations plus the reporting requirements that go with it.

But broadcasters are clever. I spoke to one yesterday at the AAAA Media Conference. Yes, he said, his stations must air 16 PSAs a week, but there is nothing saying they can’t be sponsored. Bring on Circuit City.

As for the NAB, it will have many more chances to demonstrate its prowess at the FCC. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has broadcasting in his sights and he has two willing allies (and votes) in Democrats Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein.

They are now cooking up local programming quotas that could force stations to produce and air shows that makes policymakers feel good, but that nobody wants to watch.

The day that the NAB drives a wooden stake through the heart of that proceeding is the day our polite applause becomes a standing ovation.

The case of WHNT Huntsville, Ala., that has played out over the past couple of weeks serves as another example of the problems that can arise from broadcaster’s second-class First Amendment status.

It all began Feb. 24, when the CBS affiliate went dark for 12 minutes during the broadcast of a 60 Minutes segment that is critical of former Bush hatchet man Karl Rove.

The story not seen in Huntsville suggests that Rove was involved in a scheme that led to Don Siegelman, Alabama’s former Democratic governor, being wrongly convicted on corruption charges last year.

WHNT maintains that it simply screwed up, that the 12-minute hole in its broadcast was due to a technical glitch. No harm intended.

But that explanation failed to satisfy Democratic conspiracy kooks who apparently believe that WHNT intentionally botched the broadcast because the owner (Local TV/Oak Hill Capital) or managers of the station are Rove fans and didn’t want to air anything that might offend him.

Those kooks prompted the New York Times not only to do a story on the incident, but also an editorial that asserts that it is “deeply troubling if a partisan broadcaster could suppress information on the public airwaves and hide behind a technical fig leaf.”

Copps took up the cause last Monday, calling for a formal FCC inquiry into the matter.

He agreed with the Times that the case may be “analogous” to that of WTMJ Jackson, Miss., a racist station that lost its license 50 years ago for refusing to air network reports on the civil rights movement.

“Was this an attempt to suppress information on the public airwaves, or was there really a technical problem?”

Just Copps making noise. End of story, right?

Wrong. The very next day, Chairman Kevin Martin tells reporters that he is going ahead with the inquiry, explaining that the FCC had received a number of complaints and that the inquiry was routine.

It must be true what people are saying. Copps really is calling the shots at the FCC.

Now WHNT has 30 days to explain what happen.

This is more than an annoyance to one small-market station. It’s an affront to all broadcasters.

The inquiry implies that TV stations do not have final say over what goes out over their air.

Copps, for one, thinks he can sit in Washington and second-guess broadcasters’ programming decisions.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that WHNT purposefully pulled the plug on the 60 Minutes segment because it disagreed with it.

Isn't that be perfectly appropriate?

Isn’t the ability of TV stations to have ultimate control of everything they broadcast central to the localism goal that the commissioners are always blathering on about?

Certainly, the FCC expects stations to suppress indecent network programming. It follows that they should have the right to suppress a news report with which they disagree, particularly a politically charged one.

Now, my wish is that WHNT refuses to play along with the FCC inquiry. I’d like to see Randy Michaels, who ultimately runs the station, to invoke the First Amendment in telling the FCC what it chooses to air (or not to air) is none of the its business. And it would be best if Michaels would say this using language you can only broadcast after 10 p.m.

But it won’t happen. No station can afford to antagonize the FCC and it’s not just because the FCC can revoke a license or impose a fine. It’s because it can tie up every application that WHNT and other stations in the Local TV group submits. The FCC can make any broacaster’s life a bureaucratic nightmare.

I tend to believe WHNT when it says the outage was an accident. But, you know what, I don’t care if it was or not. And neither should the FCC.