PUBCASTERS GIRD FOR ‘VERY DIFFICULT FIGHT’ ON HILL TO RETAIN FUNDING

With the House making cuts in virtually all areas in which they had sought funding, public broadcasters are hoping for better results from the conference committee. “Most of these issues will be decided in September and October, so both our stations and the APTS staff are working very hard to ensure that our funding is maintained and in some cases increased,” Lawson said. However, he added a note of caution: “The prognosis is very difficult to determine.” Out of the $410 million request for FY 2006 advance funding for CPB, the Senate proposed to appropriate $400 million and the House $330 million.

While the Senate appropriators sanctioned $55 million of the $60 million sought for digital transition at CPB, the House cut funding to zero but allowed public broadcasters to use up to $80 million for that purpose from the FY 2004 CPB general funds of $380 million that had been allocated in advance. Public broadcasters say that would result in a 26% cut in operating grants to each of the more than 1,000 public TV and public radio stations. Those cuts would hit public broadcasters at an already difficult time when they were eliminating programming and cutting other services because of the weakened economy, they said. As for the $20 million requested for public TV’s interconnection project, the Senate approved $10 million and the House none, but again allowed up to $20 million to be taken out of the FY 2004 CPB general funds.

Lawson said the House appropriators essentially had zeroed out funding for the Public Telecom Facilities Program (PTFP), which is administered by the NTIA, allocating just $2 million to meet previous commitments against a request of $70 million. There’s been no action in the Senate on the request yet. Lawson said it was ironic that the House action gutting PTFP funding came in the Commerce-Justice appropriation bill that members used to vote overwhelmingly to overturn the FCC’s decision to raise the media ownership caps. “On the one hand they voted to preserve local control of the media by overturning the FCC’s caps and in the same bill they are voting to basically gut the PTFP program that will allow our stations to provide local services in the digital age,” he said.

If the House numbers were to prevail, Lawson said, “it will be disastrous for the digital transition of our stations.” Many of the stations had moved beyond meeting the basic transmission requirements and were focusing now on production equipment and studio upgrades to allow them to produce local programming, he said: “The House action would ironically be undermining local programming production at exactly the same time that most House members have gone on record supporting locally controlled media.” As part of the effort to bring pressure on legislators, Lawson said APTS had encouraged station managers to write op-ed articles for local papers. Stations also have been asked to get their board members and other officials to contact their members of Congress about public broadcasters’ funding issues, he said: “And we have quite a few APTS staffers on any given time trying to argue for our position.”

Asked whether the House Public Bcstg. Caucus, which has 76 members, had failed effectively to take up the cause of public broadcasters, Lawson called the caucus a “wonderful political asset for us,” and said its members had “weighed in for our funding levels through various levels.” But, he said, they had to face a very difficult political and fiscal environment. However, what was important for public broadcasters was the numbers that came out of the conference committee, he said: “I'm confident that the support of the caucus will affect the outcome in a positive way.” He said it also was very important for public broadcasters to make the connection between “this great outpouring of concern for locally controlled media and the need to support public television.” Getting the message across in the local media is part of the integrated strategy being pursued by APTS to push public broadcasters’ legislative and regulatory agendas, he said.

In a clear indication that talks had all but broken down with cable MSOs on national carriage agreements, Lawson said the action had shifted to the local level, with MSOs adopting a strategy of approaching stations directly. Asked whether that meant that negotiations between the APTS/PBS team and cable operators had broken down, he said: “It appears that with one possible exception national agreements are unlikely at this stage.” He said the MSOs had been focusing on the primary stations in a given market, putting at risk the carriage of the 2nd and 3rd public TV stations. However, APTS is preparing “a number of resources” to assist such stations to negotiate and secure local carriage agreements, he said: “So we think we got some leverage at the local level and we are providing our stations with some templates and other resources to help them secure agreements at the local level.” In more than 3 years of negotiations with cable operators, public broadcasters have been able to win national agreements only with Time Warner and Insight Communications.

Lawson said there were signs that the FCC was preparing some kind of action on the issue of post-transition multicast carriage that could be acted upon in the fall. APTS executives have had meetings with several FCC commissioners recently, he said, and “they have told us that the Media Bureau is preparing for some sort of Commission proceeding this fall. We know that they are going to be looking closely at the primary video decision of January 2001, but beyond that we don’t have specific information.” He said 174 public TV stations are on the air with a digital signal.