I saw my hero Kevin Martin on TV the other day. You may not even know who Kevin Martin is. He is the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and he looks to be about 12 years old. He is probably not your hero. He worked for the Grand Inquisitor, Ken Starr, and was appointed to the FCC by the stewards of the Dark Materials, i.e. the Bush regime.
But he's my hero. Like David Souter - a comparison neither man would relish - he is right on every issue that comes before him. Martin is right about indecency on cable television. He is right that we should be able to choose which cable channels we want to pay for, and he is right that the relaxation of the cross ownership rules won't contribute to media concentration.
What is the greatest thing about Kevin Martin? The cable TV industry hates him. "Almost everything he says about the marketplace and [cable prices] is false and demonstrably false," cable industry mouthpiece Kyle McSlarrow told The Wall Street Journal last month. Special pop quiz: How can you tell if a cable television executive is lying? His lips are moving.
Martin was on TV proselytizing "DTV transition," referring to the conversion of the nation's television sets from analog to digital signals. This is a silent, ongoing public policy disaster that affects about one-fifth of the country's television households. If your TV has rabbit ears or uses an antenna, keep reading.
Even the clear-headed Martin can't explain digital conversion, an idea that was cooked up in 1996 to free bandwidth for emergency services and wireless communications. The FCC, the electronics manufacturers, the networks, the cable-TV monopolists, and even a specially created obfuscatory organ called the National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) are all trying to help the public handle the ongoing conversion, and all are failing miserably.
Who cares about the over-the-hill, rabbit-ears people? Lots of folks. Last Tuesday, the government started handing out almost $1 billion worth of coupons to help consumers pay for analog-to-digital converter boxes, which may cost around $60 or $80. That is, if stores like Circuit City and
As an experiment, I decided to see how I might convert my two TVs to the new, digital age. You can't just plug your model number into the NTIA website. That would be too easy. They want you to go to the manufacturer. Sharp Electronics told me almost immediately that my TV "will require a digital-to-analog converter to be compatible with digital broadcasts." The
Who else has a dog in this fight? The unscrupulous cable purveyors, of course. This is a great selling opportunity for them, because cable and dish subscribers don't need to convert. The PBS types care dearly about the fate of the rabbit people, because these are their viewers: the intellectual shut-ins who think nothing of spending night after night watching soupy costume dramas pirated from the BBC. Jane Austen, anyone?
Surveys conducted by the Association of Public Television Stations (APTS) have revealed the existence of "cable rejectors," people who simply don't want to pay for TV. "These people aren't poor, and they aren't Luddites," says APTS president John Lawson. "We have a big stake in keeping people from fleeing to cable or satellite because they think they have no alternative."
Lawson thinks that digital broadcasting might even spark a resurgence in over-the-air viewing. In Great Britain, for instance, the BBC, Rupert Murdoch, and others have launched a 40-channel, over-the-air service called Freeview, which reaches 14 million households. "People like free," says Lawson, who is preaching to the choirmaster where I am concerned.
Bring the cable industry to its knees with free, over-the-air programming? Where do I sign up?
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.
