Tom Wheeler

Broadcasters should move beyond rhetoric and craft a real National Broadcast Plan, a petition to Congress and FCC laying out what they feel they need to remain competitive with broadband and other TV media and continue to fill their unique role in the mediascape. Here are 10 ideas the NAB — and all TV broadcasters — can use to get started.

Saying the FCC wants to help the industry, Chairman Tom Wheeler urges support of open Internet regs and participation in the incentive auction; says the commission will back ATSC 3.0; defends the new JSA rule; and questions industry support of OET-69.

This week, after nearly four decades of gradually and carefully loosening the rules governing how many TV stations a broadcaster may own and where it may own them, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler took an abrupt U-turn, deciding to more strictly enforce the local ownership rule. He threw out years of precedents, and he did so in a punitive way.

The trade group’s two losses at the commission this week — on JSAs and joint retrans negotiations — are troubling to broadcasters because they believe FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has it in for them and other important issues are in the regulatory pipeline. But the news out of the nation’s capital is not all bad for NAB. The association is holding its own on Capitol Hill, where power is more diffused and NAB President (and former GOP Senator) Gordon Smith has some personal clout.

Speaking to a receptive group of cable operators, Tom Wheeler said that the goals Congress laid out when it passed the law have been “perverted,” and needed to be reformed.

The new rule bans new joint sales agreements in which one station sells 15% or more of the advertising time of another separately owned station in the same market. In addition, most existing JSAs will expire within two years unless the commission grants an exemption.

The FCC chairman’s contention that eliminating joint sales agreements will open up new opportunities for minority and women to become TV station owners ignores the fact that TV broadcasting is no longer a business for small operators, regardless of their gender or color. It’s a business for behemoths with negotiating clout. On the other hand, if Wheeler called off the incentive auction tomorrow, there would be all kinds of TV stations available for all kinds of buyers, including minorities and women.

“One of the results [of the proposed JSA crackdown] … will be the opening up of broadcast licenses for minorities, women, small entrepreneurs, because they’re currently being sucked off the market,” the FCC chairman told a congressional hearing Tuesday.

NAB President Gordon Smith tells FCC Chairman Wheeler that his proposed crackdown on JSAs has already financially damaged the industry and could eventually cost jobs. “It’s time to take a step back and reevaluate,” says Smith in a letter to the chairman.

When it comes to getting approval for Comcast to buy its biggest rival, Time Warner Cable, lobbyist David Cohen must win over FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler.

If a majority of the commission supports his proposal, joint sales agreements and joint TV station retransmission consent negotiations will be banned, effective immediately.

The FCC is trying to reassure House Republicans it has no plans to restrict the freedom of the press. In a letter released today, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler told Republican leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee his commission “has no intention of regulating political or other speech of journalists or broadcasters.” Wheeler defended new FCC research as the first step toward pinpointing “market barriers” that might affect the “diversity of media voices.”

Chairman Tom Wheeler will try to revive the FCC’s net neutrality regulations with a view that a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals in DC last month upheld the agency’s right to set rules for the Internet, even as it vacated much of the FCC’s 2010 Open Internet Order.

Preston Padden, executive director, Expanding Opportunities For Broadcasters Coalition: “Our beloved broadcasting industry has had a rocky time with the past two permanent Chairs of the FCC, Kevin Martin and Julius Genachowski (for sure things went better with Interim Chair, Mignon Clyburn). Now our industry has a chance for a fresh start with a new Chairman, Tom Wheeler. It is important that we get off on the right foot.”

The new commission chief will outline his regulatory views and plans on Tuesday, April 8, in Las Vegas.

And that is the importance of focusing on one’s most crucial task, something the Union general did exceptionally well. In the FCC chairman’s case, that focus should be on making sure the upcoming incentive spectrum auction is a success. For that to happen he needs broadcaster participation. So why is he risking antagonizing them with a totally discretionary attack on joint sales and shared services agreements that broadcasters have been using for the past nine years?

The local TV station group business has quickly turned into a horror show. Shares of some of the sector’s biggest players are down more than 25% this year, the result, sources say, the result of a crackdown by the FCC on stations’ joint sales agreements. Leading the crackdown is the new FCC boss, Tom Wheeler, critics say.

Patrick Butler, president-CEO of the Association of Public Television Stations: “We are certain that the overwhelming majority of public television stations will not be participating in the incentive auctions, and will instead hope to employ the technological advances at hand to improve and expand their essential public service missions in America’s communities.”

Plenty, say broadcasters.The impetus comes from liberal foes of big media, cable and satellite operators trying to slow the growth of retrans payments and possibly Wheeler’s own effort to promote broadcasters’ participation in the spectrum auction. “He’s trying to break apart broadcasters,” says one station group executive.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler blogs: “I’ve seen the future, and it’s using 50% less bandwidth to produce a picture with increased quality of up to 300%. I just completed a tour of KLCS, a public broadcaster in Los Angeles. On my visit I saw KLCS putting out 1 HD stream and seven standard-definition streams of programming on its current allotted channel of spectrum, what they call multi-casting. What’s really exciting is that as part of the pilot program with KJLA, KLCS will test broadcasting two full HD streams of programming over the same channel. If the pilot works as engineers expect it will, this could be a game changer for the concept of channel sharing.”

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler will speak at the American Cable Association’s Washington Summit on Wednesday, April 2, to share his ideas and outlook for U.S. communications policy in the coming […]

The trade group’s EVP posts a blog urging FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to make sure the commission won’t take any actions that would “harm broadcasters in unrelated proceedings to encourage participation in the [spectrum] auction.”

Washington sources say the FCC chairman is studying what to do about station sales involving sharing arrangements and postponing action on pending transactions in the meantime.

Broadcasters are anxiously awaiting details of the FCC’s plans for the spectrum auctions and resulting TV band repacking. FCC Chairman Wheeler last month laid out the schedule leading up to the auctions in mid-2015. But he did not offer a timeline for the post-auction channel switching, a process that could involve many stations and extend into 2020.

After Tuesday’s decision striking down the FCC’s netneutrality rules, the agency’s new chairman Tom Wheeler “now has the unfortunate task of dealing with strategic errors made by his predecessor. Restoring the agency’s long-standing authority over broadband telecommunications is much simpler than it appears. Wheeler needs only to reaffirm that, for Internet firms that want to send information to customers, broadband is a ‘telecommunications service,’ meaning that the F.C.C. has the authority to regulate it. He has both the time and the votes to do so,” writes Columbia Law School’s Tim Wu.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has been busy promoting the virtues of the planned incentive auction, hoping to get TV broadcasters on board with selling all or some of their spectrum to the commission for resale to wireless carriers. He’s telling them it’s a smart move and an opportunity that won’t come again. Well, my Daddy taught me that as soon as the salesman tells you that you have to act now, you should walk away. What the chairman needs to do is go public with some honest-to-god figures on what broadcasters can expect to make in the auction.

The FCC chairman says that the FCC will be giving closer scrutiny to shared services agreements that allow broadasters to skirt local ownership caps. “We’re going to do things differently,” he tells media consolidation foes in California.

On the stump to promote participation in the FCC 2015 incentive auction, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said today the ability of broadcasters to cash in on their spectrum will not come again. “That this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity is not hyperbole,” he said in a speech at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. Wheeler delivered much the same message yesterday at CES in Las Vegas.

In his appearance at the CES yesterday, new FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said: “I think there has never been a more risk-free opportunity for an incumbent service provider to morph into the new digital reality than what the spectrum incentive auction offers. I hope broadcasters begin to see that.”

Among the many things wrong with the commission’s proposed study of local media, the most egregious is its intention to interview newspeople on how they do their jobs. It’s one thing to profile the media in a market to see how it could be opened up to more players. It’s something entirely else to muck around in the editorial decision making of broadcasters and other media. ~~ Also this week, a tip of the cap to Scott Blumenthal of LIN Media who’s retiring after more than 40 years in broadcasting.

When asked whether a study commissioned by the FCC to determine whether the public’s  information needs are being met is proper, new FCC chief Tom Wheeler said all it’s doing is gathering facts. Rep. Greg Walden asked him: “Are these the kinds of questions a government entity should be asking of the news media? These seem like really internal journalistic issues.”

In his first policy address since becoming FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler says channel-sharing arrangements and must carry would let broadcasters cash in on the incentive auction and continue to stay in business.“That to me seems to be a pretty good deal,” he said Monday at Ohio State.

The new FCC chairman appoints Shannon Gilson, communications director and head of the Office of Media Relations; Jonathan Chambers, chief of the Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis; Gary Epstein, special adviser to the chairman on incentive auctions; and John Leibovitz, special adviser to the chairman for spectrum policy.

In prepared remarks, Gordon Smith rebuked the “myopic” Genachowski FCC for doing whatever it could for wireless broadband, while ignoring broadcasting, despite all the public good that it does. He also urged the FCC under new chairman Tom Wheeler to take “its responsibility seriously to drive innovation and investment in the U.S. broadcast industry, just as it does with the broadband industry.”

But other broadcast-related are not high priorities for the new FCC chairman. What are? IP transition, cybersecurity and insuring that Americans with disabilities have access to the new network technologies, he says in an interview with TVNewsCheck.

Tom Wheeler, the new head of the FCC, says he will favor the American people over the industry he once worked in. “My client today is the American people, and I am going to be the most effective advocate they could hope for,” Wheeler says.

The newly appointed FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has pieced together a top staff that comprises three “blue-ribbon, card-carrying members of the FCC club” and two “true believers” who seem to become more liberal and interventionist the older they get.

Three days into his job as the top U.S. telecommunications regulator, Tom Wheeler does not want to talk specifics about the FCC’s agenda but has a mantra that he repeats over and over: “I am an unabashed supporter of competition.”

On Tom Wheeler’s second day as chairman of the FCC, or as he called it, the “optimism agency,” Wheeler blogged. He talked about himself, the staff he appointed on Monday, the FCC’s place in history, and he began to set the framework for a Wheeler-led FCC policy. Call him the blogging chairman. No other FCC chair shared as much of himself or his point of view as quickly and as openly. Wheeler’s blog post, was based on remarks he delivered Tuesday to the FCC staff.

His staff at the commission include Ruth Milkman, chief of staff; Philip Verveer, senior counselor; Gigi Sohn, special counsel; and Maria Kirby, legal adviser for media, consumer, governmental affairs and enforcement.