[opendtv] "My Beef With Big Media / How government protects big media--and shuts out upstarts like me."
- From: Monty Solomon <monty@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 12:58:24 -0400
July/August 2004
My Beef With Big Media
How government protects big media--and shuts out upstarts like me.
By Ted Turner
In the late 1960s, when Turner Communications was a business of
billboards and radio stations and I was spending much of my energy
ocean racing, a UHF-TV station came up for sale in Atlanta. It was
losing $50,000 a month and its programs were viewed by fewer than 5
percent of the market.
I acquired it.
When I moved to buy a second station in Charlotte--this one worse
than the first--my accountant quit in protest, and the company's
board vetoed the deal. So I mortgaged my house and bought it myself.
The Atlanta purchase turned into the Superstation; the Charlotte
purchase--when I sold it 10 years later--gave me the capital to
launch CNN.
Both purchases played a role in revolutionizing television. Both
required a streak of independence and a taste for risk. And neither
could happen today. In the current climate of consolidation,
independent broadcasters simply don't survive for long. That's why we
haven't seen a new generation of people like me or even Rupert
Murdoch--independent television upstarts who challenge the big boys
and force the whole industry to compete and change.
It's not that there aren't entrepreneurs eager to make their names
and fortunes in broadcasting if given the chance. If nothing else,
the 1990s dot-com boom showed that the spirit of entrepreneurship is
alive and well in America, with plenty of investors willing to put
real money into new media ventures. The difference is that Washington
has changed the rules of the game. When I was getting into the
television business, lawmakers and the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) took seriously the commission's mandate to promote
diversity, localism, and competition in the media marketplace. They
wanted to make sure that the big, established networks--CBS, ABC,
NBC--wouldn't forever dominate what the American public could watch
on TV. They wanted independent producers to thrive. They wanted more
people to be able to own TV stations. They believed in the value of
competition.
So when the FCC received a glut of applications for new television
stations after World War II, the agency set aside dozens of channels
on the new UHF spectrum so independents could get a foothold in
television. That helped me get my start 35 years ago. Congress also
passed a law in 1962 requiring that TVs be equipped to receive both
UHF and VHF channels. That's how I was able to compete as a UHF
station, although it was never easy. (I used to tell potential
advertisers that our UHF viewers were smarter than the rest, because
you had to be a genius just to figure out how to tune us in.) And in
1972, the FCC ruled that cable TV operators could import distant
signals. That's how we were able to beam our Atlanta station to homes
throughout the South. Five years later, with the help of an RCA
satellite, we were sending our signal across the nation, and the
Superstation was born.
That was then.
...
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0407.turner.html
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