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.
***** 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