Airwave Avarice

In 1996, when Congress was considering giving broadcasters beachfront property on the information superhighway--a portion of the TV airwaves that would have fetched taxpayers up to $70 billion in an auction--Sen. Bob Dole wisely objected: “We don’t give away trees to newspaper publishers. Why should we give away more airwaves to broadcasters?”

But the broadcast lobby, mightier than the Senate majority leader, prevailed, and Congress essentially gave each major broadcasters a chunk of new “digital” frequency. There was one caveat: In exchange for getting one of the last great swaths of public real estate in America, broadcasters understood that they must take on some new public-interest obligations, to be determined by a panel of broadcasters, consumer advocates and others. It was named the Gore Commission because of Vice President Al Gore’s role in telecommunications policy.

Next week the commission will release its report; if the proposed final draft now being circulated among commission members is any indication, it will be a national scandal.

Caving in to pressure from Leslie Moonves, CBS Television president and Gore Commission co-chairman, the report’s drafters chose to not even ask that broadcasters use their new channels to provide some free air time to political candidates. Such a requirement would go a long way toward eliminating the legalized bribery that’s at the heart of corruption in American politics, wherein candidates are forced to accept large contributions from special interests in order to buy commercial time from TV broadcasters.

The Gore report, far from requiring free air time, actually has the gall to say the FCC should eliminate rules requiring broadcasters to charge political candidates their “lowest unit rate” for campaign ads. Broadcasters could offset the higher prices, says the report, by agreeing to provide “some free time” of their own choosing to candidates--say, two minutes after 3 a.m. The current system, in which candidates pay broadcasters hundreds of millions of dollars each year to reach the American people on airwaves those people own, is an outrage. But the Gore Commission is making it even worse.

The report fails to stand up for the public in numerous other ways. It fails, for example, to require broadcasters to air children’s educational programming on their main digital channel (the new spectrum can be divided into as many as six channels) or to require that broadcasters forbid alcohol and tobacco ads during hours when children’s programming is aired.

So concerned is the commission about burdening broadcasters that it even recommends that national leaders, in developing emergency broadcast services to communicate with Americans during a national catastrophe, be “minimally intrusive on bandwidth” and refrain from imposing any undue additional costs on broadcasters.

Broadcasters are already planning to cash in on their new digital stations in ways Congress had not anticipated--by launching interactive shopping, for instance, in which a broadcaster could make $10 every time a viewer double-clicks on the image of Jerry on the screen to order a Seinfeld T-shirt.

If broadcasters are unwilling to give something back to society in return for using the public airwaves, then the Clinton administration and Congress should take those airwaves back and do what they should have done in 1996: auction them off and use the money for the public good. That’s similar to what President Abraham Lincoln did, using money from the sale of public lands to build the nation’s great land-grant universities.