Man, the broadcasting industry is on a device mandate rampage these days. For weeks, we've been covering the National Association of Broadcasters call for Congress to require all smartphones to include FM receivers. This requirement is apparently what would make passage of the Performance Rights Act acceptable to the NAB—the bill would require radio broadcasters to pay royalties to performers as well as song copyright holders.
But this dubious deal isn't enough, it seems. Now the broadcasters and their supporters are also revving up their campaign to require handhelds to carry TV tuners too. The latest call comes from TVNewsCheck.
"Let's put a mobile DTV receiver in the pocket of every American so that they can tune into their favorite broadcast show anytime, anywhere—in the store, on the bus, at the dentist," the news service's editorial proclaims. "How do we do it? Convince Congress to mandate DTV tuners in all new cell phones."
And how would they do that?
"For starters," the commentary continues, "broadcasters could argue that a tuner in every phone would help insure that free, universal TV would live on as a basic high-quality video service for all Americans, no matter how much money they have and despite what the broadband elite say."
Television and FM tuners? What's next? Will all smartphones have to come with little TV dinner trays and beer bottle openers, too? But seriously folks, what's intriguing about the article (aside from that reference to "the broadband elite") is that it cites a number of precedents for the TV tuner move—first among them a mostly forgotten mandate from the early 1960s.
"There is precedent," the essay notes. "In 1962, Congress passed the All-Channel Receiver Act requiring UHF tuners in all TV sets."
We strongly advise the broadcasting industry not to bring up the Ultra High Frequency band device mandate of 1962 if it seriously plans to pursue this idea. But since TVNewsCheck did, it's an opportunity to explore what scholars regard as one of the more interesting mandate disappointments of the analog TV era. The All-Channel Receiver Act may sound geeky and obscure, but it was a centerpiece of the Kennedy administration's attempt to rescue television from the banality to which the White House thought it had fallen.
Let us go back to Camelot, and see how far a device mandate can go awry.
Nothing is better
It was 1961, and President Kennedy's new Federal Communications Commission Chair Newton Minow was speaking at the NAB's annual convention in Washington, DC. The broadcasters were already suspicious of this guy, so he tried to be nice at first.
"When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better," Minow assuringly began.
The NAB execs folded their hands and politely smiled. Wait for it, they thought. And as they expected, it came.
"But when television is bad," the FCC's new boss continued, "nothing is worse."
I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.
You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials—many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.
Minow's speech, with its oblique reference to T.S. Eliot's most famous poem, reflected the widespread perception that TV had lost its way. The Golden Age of the mid-1950s, symbolized by Paddy Chayefsky's brilliant TV drama Marty, had been shunted aside by a cavalcade of garbage like Queen for a Day and game shows, most of them corrupt.
The most famous of these contests, Twenty-One, featured the erudite Charles Van Doren—professor of English at Columbia University, who was regularly fed the answers in advance to factoid questions about opera, science, and boxing history. In 1959 Van Doren admitted before a Congressional committee that the program on which he was appeared was fixed, as were almost all the quiz shows on the dial. The scandal gave broadcasting a black eye from which it had not recovered.
Mixing it up
But the question in 1961 was how to redeem TV. Here the FCC stalled on debates that Ars readers would recognize. Minow's predecessor at the agency had tried to cajole the industry into bolstering evening TV schedules with more news, followed by "high" cultural fare from 8pm through 11pm. But this had been a voluntary plan, which fizzled when the press learned that its author had enjoyed a week long yachting trip at the expense of a prominent station owner.
The Commission also talked about toughening up licensing requirements and redefining what the FCC meant by "public service" in its guidelines to broadcasters. These proposals were accompanied by angry debates in which words like "censorship" and "accountability," appeared often. Sound familiar?
But there was one idea upon which almost everybody seemed to smile—its trajectory skillfully narrated by the historian James L. Baughman in his study Televisions Guardians: The FCC and the Politics of Programming, 1958-1967. Why not make it easier for broadcasters to start and operate UHF stations? By the late 1950s, the FCC had given most broadcasters operating in big markets Very High Frequency (VHF) licenses. These encompassed channels 2 through 13 in the 54 to 216 MHz zone (chart here).
UHF signals operated further up on channels 14 to 83 in the 70-1002 MHz area. The FCC licensed them out too, but their broadcast signals tended to be weaker. They also cost more to run with the technology of the day.
Critics in the mid-1950s charged that the Commission had botched the allocation process by licensing both UHF and VHF signals in the same market areas. This created an uneven playing field for UHF license owners, and they foundered. By 1956, over a third of the nation's UHF stations had gone dark.
"Through 1959 no individual UHF station earned more than $200,000 a year," Baughman notes, "while in 1957, 117 VHF channels passed that income figure, 43 of them netting more than $1 million each." Many TV manufacturers did not even bother to include UHF channels on their sets. By 1961 there were only 39 UHF licenses still running. Collectively, they were $20 million in the red.
Citing these bad results, UHF advocates, some boosters of early public television, called for "deintermixture"—creating VHF free zones where UHF could effectively compete. So did ABC television, which owned UHF stations in various areas.
We have a cure
Now the Kennedy administration saw UHF's revival as a key component of TV's Second Chance. Both Minow and advocates for what was then called "educational television" urged Congress to establish a device mandate for TV sets. All receivers would have to include both VHF and UHF tuners. As consumers bought new sets, they would watch UHF stations more often. Advertisers would buy time on them and the service would prosper and grow.
Minow saw this as a creative alternative to direct programming regulation. "Either you have limited channels and government regulation, or unlimited channels and no control," he explained in 1962. "The ills of television, unlike many problems which face the world today, can be cured, and opening up UHF channels 14 to 83 for more television stations is a solution."
More outlets would mean more diversity, he added, serving "smaller, special groups—but groups that are, in toto, significant both in numbers and taste."
But while the Kennedy administration won the big networks and device makers over to the UHF tuner mandate, by 1962 deintermixture was no longer politically possible. The policy would have involved wiping entire markets clean of VHF signals, something that VHF license owners, TV watchers, and their elected representatives angrily opposed. And so while TV sets now included a full complement of UHF channels, these stations still operated at a competitive disadvantage.
The result was that UHF grew as a service, for sure. The All-Channel Receiver Act, finally brought UHF "into the club," writes the broadcasting historian Steven Sterling, "even though UHF tuners did not measure up to VHF tuners in quality in the same set until the manufacturers were pushed by the FCC in the 1970s."
Yet this growth came in ways that disappointed regulators. Although a few minority broadcasters bought UHF channels in big cities, most operators produced very little new, niche, or local programming. Educational, noncommercial broadcasters who availed themselves of UHF signals could not survive without foundation funding, and clamored for the support that eventually came with the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967.
"The good Lord has never created anything that can gobble up money the way television can," lamented a public TV advocate in 1964.
And ironically, in his zeal to promote UHF, Minow's FCC overlooked another struggling service—Community Access Television, otherwise known as cable TV.
"Committed to UHF and fearful of repeating the earlier error of neglecting that portion of the spectrum," Baughman writes, "the agency promulgated layers of rules and restrictions, all designed to slow CATV's diffusion and make all-channel television succeed. Yet by the 1970s, CATV and not UHF appeared the best means through which viewers could enjoy the greater choice in programming that Minow and others had deemed so vital."
Looking backwards
Does this story mean that device mandates never work? No. The most important success would obviously be the FCC's requirement that all television receivers sold interstate or imported as of March 1, 2007 had to contain a digital tuner.
But far less successful experiments abound. These include the V-Chip. The required add-on was designed to help parents control what their kids watch on TV. But only a minority of households use the feature. Then there's CableCard, that little data wedge that was supposed to free consumers to pick the set top box of their choice—except so few do that even the FCC has admitted the policy is a failure.
In the end, device mandates are an extremely blunt instrument that only work when the overwhelming consensus is in their favor. Regulators, lawmakers, and advocates who insist on them despite the objections or disinterest of consumers, content providers, carriers, or manufacturers do so as an act of wishful thinking.
They might want to heed the UHF story and wish for something else.
Listing image by MGM
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