Newt: 2012’s Candidate With TV Policy Chops

In each of the past three presidential campaigns, one of the candidates has had considerable interest and experience in communications policy.

In 2000, it was Democrat Al Gore, who was deeply involved in communications as a senator and as vice president during the Clinton administration. In 2004, there was Democratic Sen. John Kerry, then and now a member of the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees communications policy (he now chairs its Communications Subcommittee). Sen. John McCain, the Republican entry in the 2008 election, had also served as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.

So, who might it be in 2012?

Forget about President Obama. He hasn’t shown much interest in communications policy, leaving it mostly to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

And at first glance, the lineup of Republican candidates doesn’t yield anybody who can discuss broadcast ownership limits or media content regulation with any authority.

But there is one: Newt Gingrich, and we have good idea of his thinking on broadcasting and cable matters, at least as it was nearly 17 years ago.

At the suggestion of our Washington correspondent Kim McAvoy, I went back and read a March 1995 Q&A in Broadcasting & Cable that she and Don West did with Gingrich while she was covering the Hill for B&C, West was the editor and Gingrich was at the height of his power as Speaker of the House. I was executive editor of B&C at the time.

The Gingrich that emerges from the interview surprised me. Rather than a rigid conservative ideologue, the box I had long ago put him in. He comes across as a deregulator, but a thoughtful one. Some media restrictions he would toss out, others he would modify and still others he would keep. On a few issues, he kept his options open.

He also comes across as a pretty sharp guy.

As the House Speaker with a big reform agenda, he must have been dealing with countless issues, political and policy. Yet, the strong grasp of communications he demonstrated in the interview is not something that one gains from a 10-minute briefing before the reporters walk in the door.

“We had compressed a number of questions into a short period of time and feared he would never be able to answer them all,” recalls West, who is now president of the Library of American Broadcasting. “Instead, he fired off comprehensive and knowledgeable answers as fast as we could ask them. We left the speaker’s office dazzled by his evident intelligence and command of broadcasting policy.”

And the interview shows that he had a sense of the technological changes that were driving policy. He talks about the Internet and its inevitable convergence with traditional media. I’m betting that neither current Speaker John Boehner nor his immediate predecessor Nancy Pelosi can tell you how many megahertz are in a TV channel. Gingrich could.

Keep in mind that at the time the House and Senate were working on legislation that would culminate the following year with passage of the comprehensive Telecommunications Act of 1996. So, communications might have been top of Gingrich’s mind.

As you would expect, his views of media regulation then were fundamentally conservative and pro-business. “I just think that we are at a point where we can liberate the market and let the technologies sort themselves out over the next 10 or 15 years and then revisit whether you need regulation,” he said. “But I think in the near future, the less regulation, the better.”

He favored lowering the walls that kept telephone and cable out of each other’s businesses and eliminating cable rate regulation. These reforms were included in the Telecom Act.

He speculated  that HDTV may not be such a commercial hit and that broadcasters may opt to use their digital spectrum to broadcast “four or more” conventional TV channels. That choice should be left to the broadcasters and the marketplace. And it was.

He favored auctioning of the TV spectrum that would be left after the transition to digital. And it was.

Absent fears that TV would be a “scarce commodity,” Gingrich didn’t see much need for a national ownership cap on TV stations. “… I’m not troubled by the idea of letting the market decide on the best entrepreneurial level.”

But he did not extend that let-the-marketplace-rule philosophy down to the local level, at least not entirely. Although he would jettison the newspaper-broadcast crossownership rule, he said he would keep some kind of cap on ownership of TV stations in a market. Two stations might be OK, but not five. “I think that’s wrong.”

But some of Gingrich’s positions could not be characterized as conservative or pro-business.

He said it was “totally legitimate” to consider imposing spectrum fees on broadcasters for their use of the spectrum, adding that it wasn’t an idea worth pursuing for political reason. “The practical fact is, nobody’s going to take on the broadcasters.”

Gingrich said that he would consider loosening foreign ownership restrictions on media, but only with reciprocity. “If we’re allowed to own stations in Japan, the Japanese are allowed to own here.”

Today, Gingrich is among the candidates that draws support from so-called social values conservatives. And that side of him emerges in the interview when McAvoy and West asked about broadcasters’ First Amendment rights.

Gingrich complained that there is “too much violence and too much pathology in the common media.”

But recognizing that government efforts to regulate such content would be blocked by the court, he said it was up to society to curb the excesses. “I would strongly urge the major advertisers of this country to form a council and pull all advertising from any station that broadcasts the kind of rap music that encourages the beating and mutilation of women.”

By the way, Gingrich 2012 is not so deferential to the courts. If he were president, he has been telling interviewers lately, he would muscle “activist” judges, ordering federal marshals to arrest them and drag them before congressional committees to explain their decisions. Such comments alone are reason enough for any thinking American to deny him the presidency.

Gingrich also thought stations’ giving candidate free air time might be a good idea. “[I]f you look at the general profitability of a station, I’m not sure why asking for some limited amount of time every two years is necessarily a gigantic imposition. But it is a tax ….”

I wonder if he would feel the same way today, given that the “general profitability” of a station is a lot less than what it was in 1995.

So, there you have it — a major presidential candidate with well-formed opinions on broadcasting and cable policy. You just have to adjust for the past 17 years.

As I wrote in the first paragraph of this column, it occurred to me that the communications-savvy candidates have lost. You might not want to be on Newt.

P.S. I would give you a link to the article, but as far as I know it doesn’t exist in cyberspace. The B&C online archive only goes back to around the turn of the century. Somebody like the Library of American Broadcasting needs to digitize every issue since the first in October 1931, add the appropriate metadata and make a searchable database available to everybody interested in the history of the industry. I’m certain that NewBay Media, the current owner of B&C, would give its permission.

A broadcaster named David Gleason has managed to post every B&C issue between 1938 and 1990 in PDF form, and a few issues prior to 1938. I applaud him for the effort. However, the search function is not all it could be. Here, you can read the read the July 28, 1969, issue in which coverage of the coverage of the first moon landing followed the lead story on the tobacco industry’s decision to stop advertising cigarettes on TV. B&C always knew what was most important to its readers.

Harry A. Jessell is editor of TVNewsCheck. You may contact him at 973-701-1067 or [email protected].