STATEMENT OF RICHARD C. DEAN Mr. Chairman, and distinguished members of the Subcommittee: I am Richard C. Dean. I am President and General Manager of UHF independent. television station WFMZ-TV, Channel 69, - - the Allentown, Pennsylvania. I am grateful for the opportunity to appear before the Subcommittee today and, hopefully, assist the Subcommittee in its consideration of H.R. 5949. In particular, I wish to address and, frankly, state my opposition to provisions of H.R. 5949 which provide exceptions to the "mustcarry" obligations of cable television systems. These exceptions threaten the viability of WFMZ-TV and many other small UHF broadcasters, and, thereby, service on which the viewing public has come to rely. WFMZ-TV has been on the air in Allentown since November 1976. As you know, the Lehigh Valley is considered by many to be the "birthplace" of cable television. Mountain ranges made off air reception of the Scranton-Wilkes-Barre stations and the Philadelphia stations impossible. For many years, until we decided to gamble on UHF, there was no local commercial television service in the Lehigh Valley. As a consequence, 70 percent of the homes in our home county are connected to cable. If we were not carried on the cable system, none of those homes would be able to receive our signal. In six nearby counties that are part of what we consider "our" market, from 37 to 93 percent of all households are cable subscribers. In most of these counties, the percentage of cable subscribers grows every year. We take our responsibility to serve the public interest very seriously. We provide two half-hours of local news every weeknight in prime time. Our electronic newsgathering van regularly visits communities throughout our market to cover events of local interest. We originate two hours of prime time local public affairs programming each week, and a political commentary program. We have preempted many hours from our regular schedule for the promotion of a variety of local civic activities. From what I have said, you will recognize that the FCC's requirement that cable systems carry all local signals has been instrumental to WFMZ-TV's survival. We hope that the growing number of cable subscribers in nearby counties will be a base upon which we can expand our efforts. However, the proposed must-carry exemptions for cable systems with as many as 36 channels could mean that WFMZ-TV would be denied access to cable subscribers in six of the seven adjoining counties 40 to 50 percent of our potential cable audience. We would not only be unable to expand WFMZ-TV's serivce, we could lose access to many hundreds of households which we currently serve. Dozens of small UHF stations believe they face similar losses. 98-703 0-82--19 As a That is bad enough, but, as the bill is now written, a cable system would not be required to resume carriage of a deleted station unless or until the system was expanded to more than 36 channels. By that time, WFMZ-TV, and many other stations, would be off the air. This is not unjustified pessimism. consequence of inability to gain access to cable homes, minorityowned WRBV (TV), Vineland, New Jersey, is in receivership. For the same reason, WTVE, Reading, Pennsylvania, a full-service independent station and the only station in that community, has sharply curtailed its hours of operation. Cable is made viable only by the solid basis of subscribers reached through the retransmission of broadcast signals. Its growth is due in no small part to favorable governmental treatment of cable, including nominal compulsory license fees, based on cable's claim that it is merely an extension of the subscriber's receiving antenna. As a progressive, sometimes struggling but nevertheless growing UHF independent, we don't object to cable's growth. But Congress and other governmental bodies must not allow cable to use its favored status to become of local and regional the censor - indeed the executioner - free broadcast service. Free of rhetoric or supposition, the record in many communities shows the loss or sharp curtailment of local and regional programming as the direct consequence of cable operators ignoring their obligations under the existing must-carry rules. /E.g., H. Rep. No. 83, 90th Cong., 1st Sess. 49 (1967). based are unreliable. The ratings services place only a very few diaries outside the largest markets. Individual counties in WFMZ-TV's market typically are "sampled" on the basis of as few as 6, 8 or 9 diaries, to portray the viewing habits of as many as 30,000 households. A minimal standard of reliability would be at least one diary per thousand households. Even in Berks County, with 117,000 TV homes, the typical "drop" consists of only about 55 diaries. We know for a fact, from the letters we receive, that WFMZ-TV has many hundreds of viewers in the counties where the provisions of H.R. 5949 jeopardize our right to be carried. But, taking into account diaries that are not properly filled out, and diary homes that are beyond the reach of the WFMZ-TV off-air signal or in communities where WFMZ-TV does not have carriage rights, it is clear that our future cable carriage hangs by the thread of a very few diary homes. Second, a thirty-six channel cable system is not a small system. As a point of reference, the cable system across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia, with more than 20,000 subscribers and in operation since only 1978, is a 36-channel system. The arbitrary selection of 36 channels as the cut off will only enrich systems that are already highly profitable and diminish competition in broadcasting. The manner in which the NAB and NCTA agreed on this number illustrates how little the 36-channel cut off has to do with the public interest: NAB capitulated on this point at the insistence of one of NCTA's negotiators, who operates a cable system in California. That system, under the FCC's existing must-carry rules, is required to carry the signals of sixteen television stations. In addition, according to that system's reports to the Copyright Office, subscribers receive at least four "distant" non-mandatory signals, and a choice of up to five pay movie channels. Add to that a time, weather and wire service channel, a sports channel, a 24-hour news channel, an access channel and C-SPAN (which that system is reported to carry in various trade publications/) and it is apparent that the must-carry rules work no real hardship on that system or diminish the diversity available to its subscribers. We WFMZ-TV and others have urged NAB and the cable industry to agree on provisions that will provide relief only where it is justified and in a manner that protects truly local service. have urged that stations keep their existing carriage rights throughout their 35-mile zones. Other suggestions include guaranteeing cable systems that a reasonable number of their channels will be available for non-broadcast use, or requiring cable systems to delete stations in approximately the order of their distance from the cable system. Still another possibility. would be to base the exceptions on a station's net weekly circulation. Although this data, like viewing share data, has significant limitations, it does represent the number of persons */ 1982 Broadcasting/Cablecasting Yearbook. |