In his latest book, Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick, New America Foundation scholar J.H. Snider (bio) dredges up a familiar complaint: broadcasters wielded the "extremely powerful stick" of Washington lobbying to obtain free DTV spectrum, thus ripping off taxpayers to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.
This cost has two parts, Snider argues. First, awarding TV stations a temporary second channel at no charge to facilitate the digital transition was a lost revenue opportunity: the channels weren't auctioned off. Second, wireless companies--the current darlings of entrepreneurism--were withheld from the action.
But Snider's attack is much broader than the fight over DTV. He exposes a deep personal bias against broadcasting by refuting the idea that free over-the-air TV is a good thing. He rarely passes up the opportunity to put quotes around "free," emphasizing that TV (and radio, for that matter) has been subsidized by the government in the form of lost spectrum rent. With a choice swath of unused channels in every market, broadcasting also is woefully inefficient, he says.
Given that broadcasters have gained an unbreakable foothold in the American psyche, he isn't calling for the stations to be put out of business. Instead, he wants wireless companies and others to have unlicensed use of the vacant channels on the TV spectrum.
Broadcasters oppose the idea, claiming that the lightly regulated intrusion of new users into TV spectrum poses potential for huge interference problems. Snider even takes a swing at broadcasters in the book's dedication by paying homage to Edwin Howard Armstrong, the inventor of FM radio who committed suicide a half-century ago after failing to deploy his technology. Incumbent AM stations, it seems, blocked his access to radio channels.
Whether or not you buy into his polemics, Snider has done a terrific job chronicling the political history of the 1997 law that instigated the still-underway DTV transition. Snider's account of backroom congressional wheeling and dealing makes for a better read than Joel Brinkley's seminal book on the DTV transition, Defining Vision, which often reads like transcripts of the endless rounds of industry Grand Alliance meetings that set DTV's technical specs.
Adding to the value of Snider's work are the appendices listing in an easy-to-search format the National Association of Broadcasters' lobbying activities during negotiations over the DTV law and a chronology of "Advanced TV" industrial policy developments and other battles over launching DTV.
Unfortunately, the behind-the-scenes shenanigans are obscured by Snider's overuse of economical models and behavioral flow charts to explain why all this happened. It's a shortcoming Snider acknowledges: He prepared the book as a dissertation and wanted it published quickly to influence the current debate on ending the DTV transition and didn't have time to boil it down to a less-dense format.