WGBH, WLVI reap huge windfall in sale of broadcast spectrum [telecom]

WGBH and Channel 7 owner Ed Ansin are among eight Boston-area broadcasters receiving multimillion-dollar windfalls from a government-brokered auction of nearly 1,000 broadcast frequencies sought by wireless carriers, the Federal Communications Commission disclosed Thursday.

WGBH, the public media organization, will receive $218.7 million in exchange for moving the over-the-air signals of its WGBH and WGBY stations from frequencies on the UHF band to the VHF band. The two stations broadcast from Boston and Springfield respectively.

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***** Moderator's Note *****

Leaving aside for the moment the way "PBS" is conducting a social-media PR campaign to get more money from our tax dollars and crying "poor me" at every turn, the most interesting part of the story is in the last paragraph:

The FCC auction has been years in the making and yielded a bonanza for the 175 station owners that participated nationwide, and for the federal government itself. Wireless companies, which are hungry for additional spectrum to serve fast-growing mobile networks, are paying $19.8 billion for the broadcast frequencies. The station owners will get a little more than half of that while another $7.3 billion will be used to reduce the federal budget deficit.

It's true that this wholesale giveaway of what used to be "public" airwaves has been years in the making: exactly as many years as it took to get a kleptocracy in place in Washington DC. Not only were the media moguls of the television world allowed to sell the airspace which was assigned to them as a public trust, but they were GIVEN extra channels to sell so as to assure that they would tread ever-so-lightly on the rape of my country which is now in progress.

As for Uncle Sam's take of 7,300,000,000 dollars being used to "reduce the federal budget deficit": that's a bold-faced lie. It will be used to buy more shiny things for the admirals and generals to play with, as they explain away the deaths of working-class men like me and order another shaken-but-not-stirred martini - while inventing new war stories at the corporate retreats of the same defense contractors whom are lining up to have their turn at the newly gold-plated defense trough.

Bill Horne Moderator

In article , Our Moderator evinced his misunderstanding of the broadcast television industry:

You are evidently confused about the structure of public broadcasting in the United States. PBS is a cooperative, wholly dependent on membership dues and outside funding for its continued existence. The fact that one of its members received a windfall (which was not by any means guaranteed) has no impact on the fiscal situation of the cooperative, any more than your local credit union would suddenly quadruple its dividend rate on deposits because one of its members won the lottery. Some of that outside funding comes from the government, through two mechanisms:

1) CPB and some state governments give money to stations in (mainly) rural communities to help them pay their membership dues, rent, power bills, staff salaries, and general operating expenses. This money comes with significant strings attached, most importantly it requires that the recipients raise a significant fraction of their needs from individual (small-dollar, non-foundation) donations. 2) CPB, NEA, NEH, NSF, DOE, and numerous private donors and foundations give money to program producers to allow them the financial stability to make the up-front investments in program production necessary to get shows close enough to completion that a program distributor will be able to distribute them to stations.

Where exactly did you pick up this particular load of horse-hockey?

Nobody was "GIVEN extra channels". They had to win an auction for them, or buy them from the previous licensee, as one does. One television license, one 6-MHz chunk of spectrum (that can only be used for television broadcasting). Now the government has facilitated an auction for the wireless industry to buy some of those channels from the existing television licensees, for which it will pocket a fairly substantial brokerage fee.

-GAWollman