Who Owns the Airwaves?

Technological advances and government beneficence have produced an embarrassment of riches for broadcasters -- and a possible solution to the financial woes of public television.

At issue is a chunk of broadcast spectrum that the government set aside in 1992 for every station to use to convert to digital television. Since then, new digital encoding and compression technology have made it possible for broadcasters to carry several digital channels over that same amount of spectrum -- six megahertz -- and still have the capacity left over to offer other communications services like paging and data transmissions.

Who should benefit from this technological windfall? The National Association of Broadcasters insists that broadcasters should be allowed to keep the spectrum and be given the "flexibility" to use it for more than digital television. Deficit hawks in Congress object to such a giveaway of spectrum. Early this year, the Federal Communications Commission agreed to withhold licenses until Congress decides whether to auction them.

Public interest groups see a third alternative. Some of the benefits, they say, should be used to promote public interest media. In "Pretty Pictures or Pretty Profits," a Benton Foundation working paper, Gigi B. Sohn and Andrew J. Schwartzman of the Media Access Project suggest this goal could be achieved in several different ways. If Congress orders auctions, they say, some of the proceeds should be used to help pay for public broadcasting, children's programming, or nonprofit access to advanced telecommunications networks. If it decides to let broadcasters have the spectrum for free, it should require broadcasters to make some channels available to unaffiliated programmers and provide free air time for candidates or children's programming.

Much is at stake in how the issue is resolved. "This is the most important issue, not only for broadcasters, but for consumers since the advent of TV," says House Telecommunications Subcommittee Chairman Jack Fields (R., Texas).

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