Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 15, 1993 TAG: 9305170245
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TED POWERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Roberts would have us believe that his cable company is being brought to the edge of bankruptcy because the Federal Communications Commission has ordered it (and all others, including Roanoke's money machine, Cox Cable) to roll back prices on "basic" cable a piddling 10 percent. (On May 4, cable stocks shot up when analysts confirmed that the rollback was smoke and mirrors and would not affect the industry's earnings one whit.)
In the eight years since a feckless FCC (with Congress' connivance) handed over the American consumer to the cable monopoly, most cable slaves have helplessly seen their rates doubled, even tripled in some cases. In that time, consumers have had no voice, no clout, nowhere to turn as Congress ignored the principles set forth in its own landmark Communications Act of 1934 that supposedly guaranteed that the "airwaves belong to the public."
When Sen. Barry Goldwater's bill to deregulate cable was introduced in 1983 and passed by the House and Senate in 1984, the "public's airwaves" were handed over to the cable monopoly. It was a jackpot of dimensions that not even Las Vegas' casinos could match, and not even Caesar's Palace or other pleasure palaces could guarantee such a deplorably excessive annual return on investment. But most cable systems of any size could, except the "mom-and-pop" systems in small towns that were the beginning of the cable juggernaut. Let's refresh our memories on how the industry got started.
What we now, generically, call cable, was born as Community Antenna TeleVision. People who lived in rural areas, and whose television reception required erecting aerials of Eiffel Tower proportions to get distant signals, either banded together in cooperatives or were served by entrepreneurs who put up the "sticks" to capture local and network programs and feed them by "hard wire" to individual homes. When man-made satellites with their transponders began competing with planets and stars for heavenly airspace, new programming sources like Ted Turner's visionary Atlanta-based "Super-Station," and pay channels like the pioneer Home Box Office and their imitators, began filling the spectrum. Cable became a whole new ball game. A new industry was born and if Congress and the FCC had continued to insist that, regardless of how the signals were captured, it was still "the public's airwaves," the cable industry would still have prospered and the public would have been served, not raped.
But, alas, greed distorted the television picture. The cable companies that had to bid for their franchises from the communities they proposed to serve chafed, because they had to agree in many cases to pay for the monopoly privilege they'd acquired. They chafed under price restraints in their contracts; chafed under public-service programming channels they'd promised to activate that were not revenue-producing; chafed under complaints from prisoner-consumers that outages were frequent and lengthy and that complaints went unanswered or were completely ignored.
The reasons for these deficiencies were simple. President Reagan's appointees to the FCC, including its new chairman Mark S. Fowler, were chosen to reflect Reagan's philosophical predilection for government deregulation. The cable industry had made enormous political contributions to both presidential and congressional campaigns. It had bet on the right horses and it was payoff time. The payoff was a cornucopia beyond its wildest dreams . . . an unregulated monopoly.
In the waning days of the Bush administration, at long last Congress, in response to pressure from the public, moved to redress the balance. The cable industry poured millions of dollars into a desperate attempt to prevent Congress from upsetting its sweetheart deal but an aroused public, incensed at the cable industry's arrogant picking of its pockets, let its representatives know that they were "mad as hell and weren't going to put up with it anymore." Bush, who expected his upcoming re-election campaign chest to be stuffed with big bucks from the cable moguls, vetoed the re-regulation bill passed by Congress. Impelled by angry constituents, the lawmakers endorsed one of the rare successful veto-override attempts of the Reagan-Bush years.
Now where do we go from here? The cable industry has made plain its resolve to fight the 10 to 15 percent rollback of prices for basic cable service at the FCC. It has made plans to fight re-regulation in the courts as well. And truth to tell, the so-called rollback has been made meaningless by the barely transparent ploy of the cable industry in creating a two-tiered "basic" system and then consistently reducing the number of channels that make up "limited basic" cable service. In that manner, it successfully raised rates by simply reducing the number of channels delivered for the same or even increased fees. This, in addition to the unconscionable exponential increase in rates for "expanded basic" services and the questionable and possibly illegal action of tie-in sales. This is the practice of denying consumers access to "expanded basic" without their first buying "limited basic."
And while we're at it, "basic" is either basic or it isn't. It's an absolute that cannot be diminished. In English or American, that's really basic. To cable owners who can seemingly make their own rules, "basic" is like what Humpty Dumpty said it was: "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
Consumers are appreciative of the variety that cable offers. There is nothing wrong with cable operators delivering a product and having an opportunity to reap profits for providing that product in a free-enterprise environment. What is wrong and downright un-American is a government-imposed, unregulated monopoly. As presently constituted, the cable industry enjoys the best of both worlds. It is permitted to violate the Sherman Antitrust Act with government's blessing. It must either be made subject to government oversight and control as a regulated monopoly or the element of competition, which is missing now, must be introduced so that other would-be competitors (like the telephone companies or newly formed entrepreneurial firms) might be encouraged to enter the market. Most consumers would prefer the latter, for government regulation has usually proved to be a mixed blessing. With the fiber-optics revolution multiplying the number of channels available to the average consumer by a hundredfold and more, the cable companies' financial stranglehold around the throats of it fiefs, the cable slaves, should be loosened.
Make no mistake. The cable companies will make a big show of fighting re-regulation by the FCC and the proposed 10 percent rollback of basic cable prices. They really don't care a fig about either. A miniscule percentage of cable subscribers buy only "limited basic" service. Ergo: 10 percent of a negligible number is an even more negligible number. If the FCC hadn't been prodded by a recalcitrant Congress, which, in turn, had been moved to action by "mad-as-hell" constituents, it would never have moved on its own to shield the public that it is supposed to protect.
It is up to you cable slaves to keep up the pressure on senators and representatives to put their platitudinous posturing about the free-enterprise system into legislation and get some competition into the delivery of signals into American homes. The antidote to the poison of the monopoly serpents is the serum-vaccine of the scramble for customers. In a word, competition. Those are the facts, and facts would be an appropriate acronym for an organization to fight on behalf of the consumer for a free marketplace in electronic communications. It could denote, for instance, Free All Cable Television Slaves. I hope one is formed, and I donate the acronym as my contribution.
Ted Powers of Roanoke is retired public affairs director at WDBJ-TV.
by CNB