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Frequency gveaway dwarfs Teapot Dome

Nicholas Johnson

Iowa City Press-Citizen, "Opinion," June 9, 1997, p. 9A

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Remember "Teapot Dome"? Today it's called "HDTV" and digital television.

When I was a boy, Teapot Dome was considered the political crime of the century. President Warren G. Harding's secretary of the interior, Albert B. Fall, was convicted of taking $100,000 from a couple of corporate executives, Harry Sinclair and E.L. Doheny. Fall was supposed to watch over public property, including a Navy oil reserve in Wyoming called Teapot Dome. Instead, he leased it to Sinclair and Doheny.

How times have changed. In the early 1920s it only took $100,000, it was called a bribe, and the recipient was fined and slept in the jailhouse. Today it takes millions, we call it "soft money," and you get wined and dined and sleep in the White House.

What's the most valuable public property today? Airwaves; frequencies. The FCC license that turns a $1 million studio and transmitter into a $200 million TV station. The same frequencies used for police, pizza delivery, the Army and cellular phones. Frequencies are worth far more than a Wyoming ranch. Cell phone companies have paid billions for them.

Who guards this multibillion-dollar public asset? Congress and the FCC. What have they done? Given away as much as $50 billion worth of frequency space to the broadcasters.

Did the broadcasters pay for those frequencies? No. Did they give anything in return -- like free time for political candidates, or daily high-quality childrens' programming? No. Even the Wall Street Journal characterized it as a "triple-layered banana split Uncle Sam is about to give the nation's broadcasters."

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The usual return on soft money is 1000-to-one. A million dollars contributed returns a $1 billion federal contract -- or price support, subsidy, tax break, or tariff protection. So the fair market value of the broadcasters' $50 billion windfall would normally be $50 million in campaign "contributions."

But broadcasters don't give anything like that much soft money. They don't have to. Think about it. What's the soft money buy? That's right: radio and television time. When broadcasters talk, politicians listen. Because when politicians talk nobody will be listening unless the broadcasters cooperate.

In fact, as much as 90 percent of the cost of a political campaign can go for TV and radio time. Broadcasters are licensed to serve "the public interest." Make them give the time for free and the "campaign finance" scandal disappears.

Our prisons are filled to capacity. But not with broadcasters or FCC commissioners. Even a heist of public property worth $50 billion isn't a tempest in a Teapot Dome today.

So what did the greedy little broadcasters say they were going to do with this multibillion-dollar windfall? They were going to sell us HDTV, that's what. "High Definition," digital TV. A $3000 wall-size screen with movie theater quality.

A single TV station already needs six times the frequency space devoted to the entire AM radio band used by 10,000 radio stations. Each HDTV station needs twice that. So the FCC just gave it to them.

Why? So the foam in the beer commercials will look larger? So we can get a clearer view of the sexually abused, transvestite, teen-age, drug-addicted hookers interviewed about infidelity on the afternoon talk shows? Is that the better television viewers and critics have been demanding for the last 30 years?

The phone companies are trying to sell us ISDN. It's what they call "integrated, switched, digital networks." But customers have decided it stands for "innovations subscribers don't need." "Interactive TV" is another. We not only don't want interactive TV, we don't even want active TV. We want passive TV. Just give me my couch and a remote. Now most TV watchers have decided they're going to take a pass on HDTV, too.

So are the broadcasters going to give back the frequencies? Of course not. They're going to sell paging, video games, more compressed (degraded) channels of home shopping. Anything for a buck. A scandal? An outrage? Sure.

Punishment for this Information Age Teapot Dome? Relief in sight? Not so long as big media dominates our government and politics as well as our information and entertainment.

Nicholas Johnson, former FCC Commissioner, and author of How to Talk Back to Your Television Set, teaches at the University of Iowa College of Law. His e-mail address is 1035393@mcimail.com.