Holy Moses! Ancient FCC Regs Aren’t Sacred

Today, Kevin Latek is an executive vice president at Gray Television, an acquisitive publicly traded station group. Prior to that he was a member of the cadre of communications lawyers guiding broadcast clients through the thicket of FCC regulations.

Yesterday, as a panelist at S&P Global’s annual Radio & TV Finance Summit in New York, he was asked about the prospects for relaxation of the FCC’s ownership rules that have limited consolidation of the broadcast industry.

He said he assumed the FCC controlled by the Republican majority of Chairman Ajit Pai and Commissioner Michael O’Rielly would ease the rules, which, among other things, limit broadcasters to ownership of just one station in small markets and two in large markets as long as one is not among the four top rated.

Latek went on to make a heartfelt appeal for deregulation, for local TV rules that reflect the reality of today’s TV ecosystem not that of the 1950s or even the 1990s, for rationality.

Here is a slightly edited transcript:

I am amused that people don’t understand that there’s no rationality behind the [local] ownership rules we have today. In the 1950s, the FCC said if we’re giving out lollypops, let’s be sure we don’t give all the lollypops in one city to the same guy.

They were giving [licenses] away. Literally, you applied and said I want a license. They looked at you and if you could pay for it and if there’s no one  else who wanted to put a station in Gunsmoke, Colo., you got the license. There’s no rhyme or reason why there’s a TV station in Gunsmoke.

In Harrisonburg, Va., there’s one television station. In Grand Junction, Colo., there are six. It has half the population of Harrisonburg. In any rational world, the government would say how many stations do we need in Harrisonburg, how many stations do we need in Grand Junction or better than that, who cares about stations. How many operators do we need in Harrisonburg? 

Moses did not come down from Mount Sinai with three tablets, the Ten Commandments and the FCC’s television table of allotments. So Andy Schwartzman and Free Press [a prominent lawyer and advocacy group opposed to deregulation] need to understand that it’s OK if the six television stations in Grand Junction are operated by one party if that one party is doing a good job of serving the local population just as there’s one party in Harrisonburg that’s doing a fine job serving the local population there.

This magical myth about the number of full-power TV stations that we have to have [independently] owned in a local market is silly. We don’t have anyone telling us how many cable channels should be available in Grand Junction or how many newspapers should be available there or how many [internet] radio station or how many  local websites.

The market will decide what’s important.

We have an FCC that came up with this dumb rule in the completely different world of  the 1950s. It didn’t make sense then and it doesn’t today.

It has changed the local rules just once, in August 1999, ironically under President Clinton. They have not been changed since.

In 1999, our CRT television set cost $3,000 and weighed 200 and something pounds. I know. I bought one in 1999. That was our world. We had portable CD players. That was our world. Facebook and for that matter My Space would not be invented for another five years. 

Those are the rules we are living under today and we have folks who are telling the Third Circuit and the D.C. Circuit that democracy is going to end and the world will stop spinning on its axis if, God forbid, these magical licenses are all held by a different number of people than what the FCC said they should be owned by in 1950 or 1999.

It’s just about the most absurd thing the government has figured out in Washington and that’s saying a lot. So we have the chance here where we have two Republican [FCC] commissioners who understand the world is not 1999 or 1950 and they need to adjust the rules to allow the economy to work.

At the end of the day, if we have a strong provider in any market that is doing a good job, they will prosper, and if they are doing a bad job, they will fail. There’s nothing wrong with that. So let us do our job and serve the local community the best we can.

I don’t know what the answer is, but the I think the FCC will come up with something more rational — or simply something just basically rational — that is better than what we have today.