Air war

It is a battle that has it all: power, money, entrenched interests, and a fair share of snark. It’s the spectrum war, where two of the major sets of players in the media business -- the broadcasters and the telecoms -- are battling over how to divide a path to consumers that the TV guys have controlled for decades.

The broadcasters are the ones carrying the scars, having already been forced two years ago to surrender 25 percent of the airwaves they held, when the federal government’s long-planned, long-delayed conversion from analog to digital TV finally went through. In this fight they, and their representatives at the National Association of Broadcasters, have been cast as the old guard, desperately trying to ward off change despite the fact that, thanks to the spread of cable and satellite, only about 40 million out of their 300 million-strong American audience comes to them exclusively via the airwaves these days.