Not only was FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel in attendance at the NAB Show, delivering remarks at a Monday welcome session, but Republican Nate Simington was also at the Las Vegas affair one day earlier.
Simington was at the conference on Sunday, April 16, and he was there to talk about the future of ATSC 3.0. His remarks were part tongue-in-cheek and part missive, using sarcasm to scorch the Democratic leadership of the Commission on matters including Standard General’s potentially fatal acquisition of TEGNA and acts that led Sinclair Broadcast Group to abandon a planned merger with Tribune Co.
Simington’s biting commentary infused his words right from the start, immediately quipping after discussing the future of ATSC 3.0 that it doesn’t have a future, nor does the broadcasting sector. As such, he joked, “The Commission should redirect scarce resources toward higher value regulatory activity, and permit this legacy industry to languish beneath the weight of the regulatory load we’ve put on it until, at length, it expires, and we can direct the use of whatever remaining regulatory fees we may have collected toward burying it in the grave next to local newspapers.”
He quickly said “sorry” for reciting those words, saying sarcastically that they are from the draft of a public notice that the Media Bureau is about to put out regarding the Commission’s ATSC 3.0 Task Force.
Uh-oh. Simington was going to go there with respect to how the Media Bureau issued a hearing designation order to Standard General, TEGNA and Cox Media Group regarding the purchase by Soo Kim-led Standard General of TEGNA. “No wait, I think you actually have to, hang on, yes you have to agree to that explicitly before you can get a low power construction permit,” he joked. “Naturally, this is all being done on delegated authority.”
After some laughs, the normally straight-as-an-arrow Simington admitted that was “just a little ribbing. I promise we’re just joking.”
But, Simington then turned serious for a second, stating, “The average conception of the broadcasting industry in D.C .is in black-and-white, both figuratively and literally. Figuratively, in that we think of broadcasting as a family huddled around a glowing CRT television set, watching the Eagle land during the Apollo 11 mission. A glimmering jewel of cultural prestige whose perfect facets shone to millions all at once—as splendid as any sunrise, and better-attended. That memory is, for many in D.C., not metaphorical, but literal.”
That’s because too many in the corridors of power in Washington, Simington believes, “have an actual memory of that moment, and may forever think of broadcasting as not unlike the Apollo program: an engine of American greatness and dominance that is now redolent of a bygone era. Like newspapers, like steel, like auto manufacturing, they view broadcasting with a certain nostalgia. And that’s often in the best case. But, remember, ‘nostalgia’ was introduced as a concept to describe a sickness—a longing for things past that can never be satisfied. And long memories sometimes make bad policy. And that’s where we in D.C. sometimes think of broadcast in black and white, literally.”
He elaborates, “We think often of broadcasting as the end product of a sheaf of rules and constraints, necessary to safeguard the American public and purse from marauding robber barons and their ne’er-do-well scions. Literal reams of black-and-white text. And we, the regulatory state, the sentinels who enforce the public interest, do so by standing between broadcasters and the American public. An image of a necessarily adversarial relationship, where, but for regulatory intervention, broadcasters would behave badly. And that image of broadcasting is reflected in media itself—you’ve all seen the episode of Last Week Tonight, where they spliced together a couple of dozen talking heads on Sinclair affiliates reading the same script.”
Simington had some choice words regarding that John Oliver bit.
“Imagine it. Sinclair. Sinclair! The terror, the horror! The grotesque beast stalking the American cultural landscape, sewing rancor and division where its cloven hooves fall! Not Sinclair!”
As of today, Sinclair is, according to Simington, 0.72% of the market cap of Disney. While Simington doesn’t have “any particular truck” with Disney, he believes ABC “can, and does, influence the fortunes of most of the broadcasters in this room. But, please, tell me more about the worrying media consolidation and the cultural influence of station groups operating in Abilene.”
Thus, Simington argues that the fact is broadcasters don’t act badly, for at least three reasons. “First: they just don’t,” he said. “I’ve seen broadcasters, time and again, go above and beyond for the communities they serve and with whom they engage. They do things for their communities that no one asks them to do, and for which no one recognizes them, because they don’t tell anyone about it. You have to dig deep and ask on site visits. It isn’t on the website. Second: let’s be real. The broadcasting industry is at an inflection point, but no one can credibly argue that the cards are in the broadcasters’ favor. Broadcasters have neither the scale, the political capital, nor the actual capital to make big moves right now. They are constrained in so many ways, and their few missteps recently have largely been sins against ministerialism, or, in many cases, not even sins at all. Just broadcasters trying to run broadcast businesses, and regulators getting their noses out of joint because they didn’t ask for permission first. Every move they make is a tentative one.”
The third reason, Simington says, is that broadcasters “are functionally constrained from real M&A activity right now.”
He comments, “Broadcast assets have been devalued by several recent Commission decisions in a way that really ought to force us to rewrite the takings section of constitutional law treatises. And that posture, incidentally, hits small and minority-owned broadcasters looking to exit much more than it does yonder corporate raider. The family-owned broadcaster running a handful of stations has broadcast concerns as their largest assets, whereas larger outfits can redirect capital out of broadcast and into higher return verticals much more readily. When we slow the dynamism in the broadcast market, we hurt those we seek to help.So: broadcasters are not bad actors; broadcasters are the clear economic underdogs in the modern, unified media marketplace; and broadcast transactions are, possibly, illegal, or, at least—likely to need further study.”
Is there any good news from Simington’s perch? Yes. “ATSC 3.0 is cool. Datacasting is cool. Targeted, relevant advertising is cool. Advanced emergency alerting is cool. International uptake of ATSC 3.0 in international broadcast standards and technical frameworks and specifications is cool. Or, they can be cool. They can also not be, and you know that. It can be a lot less cool if we do nothing. I’m not saying that the Commission needs to intervene heavily to drive adoption, but how about a little bit of interest? We’ve buried broadcasters under outmoded regulations, and shaved broadcast spectrum as thin as the commonly-cited justification for broadcast regulation that ‘broadcasters don’t pay for their spectrum.’ What a high-margin business you must operate, folks! Let’s call an Alphabet exec in here and give them a show on what real operating margin looks like. There are a lot of restrictions designed to protect consumers throughout the ATSC 3.0 transition. Simulcasting rules, lateral hosting rules, and so on.
“Spectrum-constraining rules designed to make sure that you aren’t leaving your viewers behind. As though that were your plan. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that there are no legitimate concerns here, and that no safeguards are appropriate, or that the Commission should pull out all of the stops to help broadcasters through a voluntary transition. I’m not suggesting that. All I’m saying is: we can do more. It’s a potentially transformative technology for the viewing experience, for alerting, for marketing, and, in my view especially, for datacasting. But it can be a missed opportunity if we do nothing. We can turn broadcast into a residue of the black-and-white past with our black-and-white rules, or we can broadcast in 4K HDR and see what happens. This is mostly on you folks, but we have a part to play, too. We can, and we must.”
