As a follow-on to Mangala's diary from earlier today, "Another ATTACK on the POOR: Digital TV Conversion", the New York Times is reporting the Obama team has quickly backed-up the advice of the Consumer's Union(the non-profit publisher of Consumer Reports) in requesting Congress delay next month's scheduled national conversion to digital television from analog.
The Consumers Union sent a letter to Henry Waxman and Edward Markey yesterday laying out their concerns. As re-published in The Consumerist, their letter laid out a plain case for delay --
On behalf of Consumers Union, non-profit publisher of Consumer Reports, we write today to express our concern that the nation may not be ready for the digital television transition on February 17. We believe Congress should consider delaying the transition until a plan is in place to minimize the number of consumers who will lose TV signals, particularly by fixing the flaws in the federal coupon program created to offset the cost of this transition.
On January 4, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced that funding for the federal converter box coupon program had run out. NTIA is now placing hundreds of thousands of consumers onto a waiting list each day, and telling consumers to either pay for converter boxes themselves, or subscribe to cable or satellite TV service.
The federal government will receive over $19 billion as a result of the DTV spectrum auction. Millions of consumers could now be forced to spend their own money to navigate this federally mandated transition. This economic climate is not the right time to ask consumers to dig deeper into their own pockets to pay for the miscalculation by the federal government.
Consumers need assistance to navigate the transition at the lowest cost possible. Although the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced yesterday $8.4 million in grants to 12 grassroots groups, we are concerned the timing and level of funding for on-the-ground education is inadequate. To put the announcement yesterday into context, the United Kingdom is spending close to $400 million to educate a population one-fifth the size of the U.S. about its digital broadcast transition.
Also troubling is the Federal Communications Commission’s call center system. We are concerned that the FCC call center is not equipped to handle the flood of calls before and after the DTV switch. We are confident that with some additional time and expeditious planning the federal government can put a strategy in place to ensure that all these calls will be handled appropriately.
With February 17 only forty days away, we are concerned that millions of at-risk consumers, including rural, low-income and elderly citizens across the country could be left with blank television screens. Consumers have fewer resources than ever to buy the necessary equipment to regain access to essential news, information and emergency broadcasts. Against this backdrop, Congress should consider delaying the digital transition so the significant flaws in the converter box coupon program can be adequately addressed and sufficient local assistance put in place to help millions of consumers who are being forced navigate this transition.
The Obama team, in the person of John Podesta, followed up expeditiously --
In the most significant sign to date of concern about the impending digital TV transition, the Obama transition team co-chair John Podesta said the government funds to support the change are “woefully inadequate” and said that the digital switch date, Feb. 17, should be “reconsidered and extended.”
Echoing concerns from consumers groups, Mr. Podesta said that the Obama transition staff has found major difficulties in the transition, which was authorized by Congress in 2005. On Feb. 17, stations are scheduled to cease their analog transmissions and broadcast only in digital form, requiring consumers who rely on over-the-air signals to install converter boxes.
From the start, in my opinion, this conversion has been screwed up for two simple reasons -- 1) Free television is a national security issue, and 2) the conversion was not designed to be free.
Television is a critical public communication device that can and does communicate life-saving information to the widest possible audience frequently, and when properly harnessed (which it so rarely is in the US because of its prevailing commercial economic model), it educates and enlightens people at a fundamental level.
As a device for disseminating emergency information alone, public, government, non-profit and commercial television should be freely accessible to the public, exclusive of the purchase/acquisition of the TV itself. In the case of Hurricane Katrina alone -- to take just one example -- tens of thousands more people would have perished had television been inaccessible because of the unavailability or cost of converter boxes.
Beyond this, television provides basic literacy and numeracy tools for children and adults, and is a critical force in the act of voting and other forms of civic participation. Where television fails in these regards, it is not inherently fault of the medium, but rather cynical and greedy management of the resource over generations, abetted by increasingly lazy and corrupt regulation.
We cannot properly or responsibly transition the country from analog to digital television without assuring that there is a free, reliable, replaceable converter available for every single television set in the country. The cost of this would have and will always be miniscule relative to other federal expenditures.
The current screw-ups that will deprive literally millions of people from access to television next month were totally predictable, because there was never a premium placed on the public safety role television plays in American life. It was a typically irresponsible plan concocted largely by for-profit companies and dictated to a dependent, ignorant (and in the GOP's case, craven) legislative class.
I agree with the Consumers Union and now the Obama administration that the conversion should be suspended. I would extend the suspension until such time every American with a television can use it as a public safety and information device free of charge. This point should not be -- and should never have been -- subject to concession.
Parenthetically, last year was the 50th anniversary of Edward R. Murrow's blistering and prescient speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association. Murrow knew his medium, and feared where it was headed -- essentially to the trainwreck of a mass media system we have today and that we all lament. He saw the peril clearly, and our body politic has been paying ever since.
This nation is now in competition with malignant forces of evil who are using every instrument at their command to empty the minds of their subjects and fill those minds with slogans, determination and faith in the future. If we go on as we are, we are protecting the mind of the American public from any real contact with the menacing world that squeezes in upon us. We are engaged in a great experiment to discover whether a free public opinion can devise and direct methods of managing the affairs of the nation. We may fail. But we are handicapping ourselves needlessly.
Let us have a little competition. Not only in selling soap, cigarettes and automobiles, but in informing a troubled, apprehensive but receptive public. Why should not each of the 20 or 30 big corporations which dominate radio and television decide that they will give up one or two of their regularly scheduled programs each year, turn the time over to the networks and say in effect: "This is a tiny tithe, just a little bit of our profits. On this particular night we aren't going to try to sell cigarettes or automobiles; this is merely a gesture to indicate our belief in the importance of ideas." The networks should, and I think would, pay for the cost of producing the program. The advertiser, the sponsor, would get name credit but would have nothing to do with the content of the program. Would this blemish the corporate image? Would the stockholders object? I think not. For if the premise upon which our pluralistic society rests, which as I understand it is that if the people are given sufficient undiluted information, they will then somehow, even after long, sober second thoughts, reach the right decision--if that premise is wrong, then not only the corporate image but the corporations are done for.
[snip]
It may be that the present system, with no modifications and no experiments, can survive. Perhaps the money-making machine has some kind of built-in perpetual motion, but I do not think so. To a very considerable extent the media of mass communications in a given country reflect the political, economic and social climate in which they flourish. That is the reason ours differ from the British and French, or the Russian and Chinese. We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.
President-elect Obama just betrayed his opinion that it might not yet be too late.