Broadcasters Have Rare Champion In Pai

Say what you will about Trump (don’t get me started), but he did the smart thing in promoting FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai to chair of the agency this week. It wasn’t unexpected. He was the consensus choice of most affected industries.

And that goes especially for broadcasting. Not since the late James Quello, who served 10 months as interim chairman in 1993, has the FCC had a leader who values free, universal over-the-air TV as Pai apparently does and believes in policies that would help sustain it.

Among other things, they include relaxation of national and local ownership limits, the rapid rollout of ATSC 3.0 and a hands-off approach to programming.

I can say this with some confidence because Pai has a lengthy record of almost five years on where he stands on broadcast matters, much of in the form of dissenting comments on the actions or — more often in the case of ownership rules — the non-actions of his immediate predecessor Tom Wheeler.

During his reign, Wheeler had ample opportunity to relax the national and local ownership restrictions on TV stations groups. He chose not to. In fact, he tried to make the rules more restrictive.

He outlawed joint sales agreements, which scores of broadcasters have been using to shirk the local ownership caps, and he knocked out the UHF discount, which locked in the national ownership cap at 39% of TV homes.

Congress later reversed Wheeler, eviscerating the JSA action, but the UHF action is still on the books.

As part of a two-man minority at the FCC (Michael O’Reilly was his able partner in dissent), Pai couldn’t stop Wheeler and the other Democrats, but he could express his disapproval, which he did in his long, wonderfully written, extensively footnoted statements.

In making the case for JSAs, Pai was, in essence, making the case for relaxing the local ownership rules so that broadcasters in small and medium markets could own two stations just as their brethren in big markets can.

Likewise, in dissenting on the UHF discount, Pai set the groundwork for reversing the vote (Ion and Trinity have filed for reconsideration) and, perhaps, launching a rulemaking to lift the cap to 45% or 50%.

I think it is also safe to say based on his writings that Pai will, at his first opportunity, move to rid the world once and for all of the wretched newspaper-broadcast crossownership ban, which stands as a testament to backward thinking and bad government.

Let me note here that while Pai may be willing, how far he will go in relaxing or eliminating the rules may depend to some large extent on the broadcasters themselves. Unleashing more M&A is not everybody’s idea of a good time.

Some may not like the idea of big broadcasters like Sinclair and Nexstar bulking up even more or invading their markets with multiple Big Four network affiliations.

Remember, it was affiliates, concerned about the networks buying them out, that frustrated attempts to raise the national cap to 45% in the early 2000s during Michael Powell’s watch at the FCC.

Among the most ill-conceived ideas to come out of the FCC on Wheeler’s watch was a proposal to analyze the content of local media and interview scores of local reporters and news managers around the country to figure out why they cover the stories they do. It’s the kind of hare-brained thing Democrats do when they are getting set to regulate something.

Pai joined in the conservative backlash. In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in February 2014, Pai said the initiative was a “first step down the same dangerous path” as the Fairness Doctrine, which the Reagan FCC canned in 1987 as an affront to the free press. With opposition mounting in Congress, Wheeler wisely scuttled the whole idea a week later.

However, Pai’s unwillingness to meddle in broadcast programming has its limits. In my too many years following the agency, I have not seen a Republican chairman who did not try “to clean up the airwaves” under pressure from the religious right. So, I would not be surprised to see the Pai crank up the indecency enforcement apparatus once again.

At the NAB Show last year, Wheeler said he would “move with dispatch” on broadcasters’ petition to allow them to implement on a voluntary basis the new ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard.

He took a round of comments on the petition, but never launched the rulemaking. However, there is hope that the phrase “with dispatch” means more to Pai. At a Senate hearing last fall, he was the only one of the five commissioners to bring up the standard.

“Just as the United States is leading the way on 5G in the mobile space, so too should we be at the forefront of innovation in the broadcast space,” he told the senators.

“Other countries aren’t standing still. Earlier this year, for example, South Korea adopted the ATSC 3.0 standard, and ATSC 3.0 broadcasts are scheduled to begin there in February 2017. We should get moving, too.”

Pai possesses all the personal and professional experience and qualities  you would want in a public official. Writing in The Hill this week, Adonis Hoffman, chairman of Business in the Public Interest, does a fine job of describing the traits that have earned him such good marks in telecom policy circles.

But as he ascends to his new office, Pai may find maintaining his equanimity more difficult. He’ll have to balance the interests of competing and powerful factions. He’ll have to say “no more” — in ways that will count, in ways that will affect his future.

And he may be tested in ways that we have not seen since the days of Johnson and Nixon.

As Trump hatchet man Steve Bannon made clear yesterday, the new administration is at war with the media and the FCC could become a battleground in that war if Pai doesn’t fiercely defend the independence and integrity of the agency.

White House meddling is hard to resist.

Although Trump elevated Pai to chairman with no “interim” or “acting” before the title, it looks to me as if he is on probation. His term expired last June and he is serving now under a grace period. Unless he is reappointed by Trump/Bannon, his days at the FCC come to an end at the end of this year.

I found it interesting that in his inaugural address to FCC staff on Wednesday, Pai said that among his core priorities was closing the “digital divide” — making sure “all Americans” can enjoy the benefits of the media proliferating on the internet.

The goal expresses a commitment to inclusiveness and equal opportunity. The same impulse may be behind his enthusiasm for broadcasting. If broadcasting is anything, it’s inclusive. It doesn’t turn folks away because they can’t pay a monthly fee. It wants all the viewers it can get.

Harry A. Jessell is editor of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 or here. You can read earlier columns here.