Emily Barr
It’s high time we changed a few rules.
Throughout my four-decade-plus career, I often visited with FCC commissioners and their staffs to plead our case regarding outdated or irrelevant rules and regulations rendered so by technological changes, societal shifts and competitive changes significantly impacting the broadcasting landscape.
In some cases, our pleas were heard, and changes were enacted. Children’s television rules were relaxed once everyone came to understand that traditional broadcast was no longer a significant driver of children’s programming. Public files were finally allowed to be accessed online long after they should have been, making it far easier for anyone to examine what used to require a physical visit to a television facility. And political advertising schedules were finally allowed to be viewed on the FCC’s designated site, allowing anyone who cares the access and knowledge of just who is behind on-air political ads.
While these changes were helpful, they required years of prodding and discussion with an FCC staff still clinging to the notion that broadcasting should be regulated and governed as it was 30 or more years ago. There has been little to no regard for the elephants in the room — streaming media, artificial intelligence, networks controlling negotiations with video distributors and the massive disintegration of print media, all of which together have left broadcast news and a few nascent digital start-ups to cover the news across far too many communities.
Apparently, the notion that broadcasters must adhere to a strict set of rules and regulations is perfectly OK with an FCC also willing to allow massive tech companies to have the ability to scrape data from traditional news media outlets without so much as a set of practices or guidelines. If this is not the “upside down,” to borrow an idea from Stranger Things, I don’t know what is.
Now, local broadcasters are finally fighting back. This past week, the Coalition for Local News was formed to promote the essential value of local news and how it impacts Americans in communities large and small. Backed by the ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox Affiliate Associations, the coalition is planting its flag and proudly highlighting the importance of local journalism to the well-being of our individual communities and the health of our democracy. I could not agree more.
Throughout my decade-long tenure with Graham Media Group, I argued forcefully but unsuccessfully for changes to the “streaming loophole” so that local stations, including those unaffiliated with any of the major networks, would have the right to negotiate directly with video distribution platforms like YouTube TV and Hulu+ Live TV to secure equitable compensation for our local programming, including critical news and weather information.
Television stations spend the lion’s share of their expenses on gathering and disseminating local news to the people they serve. And yet, the “streaming loophole” allows the major networks to negotiate deals directly with linear streaming platforms for the carriage of local stations’ signals, despite the fact that some of these same networks own or are heavily invested in the streaming platforms with which they negotiate.
Ultimately, affiliates are left with a take-it-or-leave-it deal at rates well below market, at a time when stations can ill-afford to forgo any compensation to continue to produce and deliver local news. Meanwhile, the FCC has long argued that these streaming services needed time to “get on their feet” and more recently suggested that there are issues of authority simply because the manner in which these streaming platforms deliver content is distinct from traditional cable or satellite. But that argument has never held water, including when the FCC first looked at the issue as part of the 2014 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.
Without doubt, the video marketplace and the media landscape have undergone tremendous change in the past decade. Most local broadcasters desperately want to do a better, more comprehensive job of covering the news. But this requires manpower, training, equipment and ongoing investment in technology, and none of it is sustainable if the underpinning of broadcasters’ revenue is in jeopardy.
Retransmission consent fees received from cable and satellite are dropping steadily as viewership continues to move to streaming platforms, including YouTube TV, Hulu+ Live TV, fuboTV and others. The below-market rates negotiated by networks, or, in some cases, the lack of any rate should the station in question not be affiliated with a major broadcast network, are making the whole situation untenable. Something has to give.
I hope the Coalition for Local News is able to raise its collective voice loudly and forcefully. Changing outdated rules is a major step toward a more equitable marketplace, and I am certain local broadcast news will survive and thrive as a result. Most important, a well-informed citizenry and the health of our democracy depends on it.
Emily Barr is the former president and CEO of Graham Media Group.
16 May 2024
23 May 2024
Comments (5)
AIMTV says:
July 24, 2023 at 10:01 am
On point, as usual, Emily. My experience with streaming platform Chicken Soup for the Soul’s Crackle was a shameful debacle of glib and misleading promises, unfulfilled commitments, wildly inaccurate revenue projections, and an exceedingly sloppy disregard for intellectual property rights (I lovingly call it “The Crackle Debacle”). A society or industry w/o rules may sound like fun, but it’s anarchy. A few may benefit for a time, but in the end, all will suffer.
Rules stuck in time are just as bad. Imagine what the FCC would do without someone from the TV industry prodding them? Listened to AM, Talk, or “Religious” radio in a while? Try it sometime if you can stomach it. The FCC is MIA. Selective enforcement of outdated rules is worse than no enforcement at all.
BeyondTheBeltway says:
July 24, 2023 at 11:03 am
The idea that regulatory incentives to hire more local reporters will result in better government is a myth. In fact the opposite is true. Why would reporters who would depend on government support for their very jobs do anything other then carry water for that system? Sure, to keep the myth going, they will expose a “corrupt” politician every now and again, usually one who has fallen out of favor.
The FCC long ago was captured by the broadcast and cable industries. Now that technology has left print behind and is threatening the legacy electronic media, the established insiders are panicked and are turning to their long time protector for help.
Today, citizens can watch local government meetings, examine public records and debate local issues all on line.
Washington DC is covered up in reporters, yet our Federal government has never been more corrupt. We need better reporters not more stenographers and certainly not ones that are beholding to the government. Government inserting itself into the news business has always been a bad idea, wether it is “former” FBI agents censoring posts at Twitter or tax incentives for newsrooms. Let’s be careful what we wish for.
Former Producer says:
July 24, 2023 at 12:09 pm
I have little sympathy for the broadcast industry’s current state of affairs.
The Internet did not suddenly appear and steal viewers. It has been around, for practical commercial purposes, since the 1990s. Broadcasters had all this time to utilize this medium and, yes, to monetize it.
What happened? Broadcasters failed to act. They instead were happy with the status quo and the old way of doing things. Only now is the broadcast industry crying about it. It’s no different than what happened to the newspaper industry. And it’s happening now. Three companies (Nexstar, Gray, and Sinclair) own most of the TV stations in the U.S.
Let’s not forget that the broadcast airwaves belong to the public. Broadcasters have a mandate to serve the public interest. Many companies simply give this lip service, and the FCC largely allows this to happen (i.e. Nexstar and Sinclair with their sidecar deals with Mission, Deerfield, and Cunningham, etc.). But on the rare occasion when the FCC remembers the public nature of the airwaves? That’s when the broadcast industry and its executives suddenly cry foul and say, “Oh no, woe is us! We have to play by the rules and we don’t like the rules, even though we’re making millions or even billions of dollars in revenue!”
The broadcast industry dropped the ball. It failed to capitalize and monetize the Internet when the opportunity existed. It now relies on a risky revenue model of charging more money to cable/satellite operators who are losing customers to said Internet.
Broadcasters aren’t yet drowning, but they put themselves in the deep end of the pool. And it’s only getting deeper.
TheMoreYouKnow says:
July 24, 2023 at 1:49 pm
Well, I have little sympathy for those who fail to learn their industry history.
Broadcasting is, and always has been, a business that operates in the public interest. But still governed by the principles of business. For some three decades, cable operators retransmitted local broadcast television stations and built their news business, with no fees paid to the broadcasters for the channels that customers consistently watched the most on their cable subscriptions. They vigorously fought having “must carry” rules that prevented them from picking and choosing which broadcast signals they might carry. When the US Congress finally acted in 1992 to allow retransmission negotiations to begin, cable companies fought the idea of paying for local television signals for years. They relented, but then highlighted the fees on customer bills as “local broadcast access fees” while quietly ignoring that they typically paid for more per subscriber for certain sports channels than all broadcast channels combined. This scenario would repeat in 1999 with the satellite companies.
And so to some large degree, history has repeated itself again with the internet-based multichannel video providers. Though as Emily Barr correctly points out, the networks have far different investments with streaming providers than they did with cable back in the day.
So while it’s easy to bash broadcasters for wanting to get paid for the local news and programming they produce and continue to provide over the air at no cost to viewers–let’s remember that the landscape has changed dramatically for all media in the three decades since the internet’s arrival in the 1990s. Simply trashing the folks who are still trying to cover what is happening in their local markets, both on-air and online, with the blanket sarcasm of “too bad they couldn’t make money in the early days of the internet” fails to recognize that once again the deck was stacked against broadcasters as a new competitor emerged,
Thus the rules that broadcasters have to operate under–as being the party that is completely subject to federal licensing and oversight, should be made far more equitable to how the business operates in 2023.
BJohnson says:
August 15, 2023 at 11:02 am
When we had the debate over compensation or must carry status the vast majority of stations wanted the cash. Now the cash AND the viewers are dwindling so it must be the fault of the regulations?
The networks and the station groups sued to shut down services such as Aereo and Locast even though the latter was non-profit. You succeeded in protecting your IP rights to the point that hardly anyone under the age of 75 is watching. “Hey, we did a newscast, locked it in a box and buried 10 feet in the ground. Now what?”