Valenti Irks Broadcasters With Stand on Cable Bills : Entertainment: Coalition is threatening reprisals if Hollywood backs the Administration’s veto of re-regulation.

Washington politics is known to make strange bedfellows, but perhaps none more peculiar than Hollywood’s powerful lobbyist Jack Valenti and the Bush Administration.

Valenti, renowned for his longtime relations with key Democratic lawmakers, is threatening to support a Bush Administration veto of controversial cable TV re-regulation bills that have been overwhelmingly approved by both the House and the Senate.

Those bills, now in conference to iron out the differences, are aimed at curbing the escalating rates of basic cable TV service.

But in a pointed example of Washington power politics at its most bare-knuckled, the head of the National Assn. of Broadcasters, which lobbied heavily for passage of the bills, has threatened reprisals against Hollywood if Valenti follows through on his veto support.

Valenti’s unusual position--revealed in private meetings this week--comes in the wake of his failed efforts to get the House version to include an amendment that would have benefited the Hollywood studios. Valenti is trying to get the amendment reinserted in the upcoming conference.

The studios want to repeal a law known as compulsory license, which allows cable TV systems to pay a blanket fee to carry broadcast signals without negotiating copyright permission with each program owner.

They believe that such a repeal would significantly increase the $175 million in fees collected annually from the cable industry.

The prospect that the Hollywood studios, led by Valenti, would seek to defeat the hard-fought cable TV re-regulation bill by supporting President Bush’s veto threat has so outraged the coalition formed by the NAB that it warns of a counterstrike. The NAB believes that it will prevail in getting provisions inserted that would force cable systems to pay local broadcasters for carriage. That would be a shot in the arm for financially squeezed broadcasters.

“In the past, we have remained neutral on a number of issues affecting Hollywood,” says NAB President Eddie Fritts, citing everything from violence in TV programming to rap artist Ice-T’s controversial recording “Cop Killer.” Now, says Fritts, his coalition “will become major players on those issues.”

Although some observers immediately pegged the NAB’s big-stick response likely to backfire--broadcasters are near totally dependent upon Hollywood for entertainment programming--it nonetheless points up the high-stakes politics over the cable bills.

Over the last two years, Congress has tried to pass legislation that would give cities back the authority to regulate cable TV that it took away with the 1984 Cable Act.

Past attempts have all foundered because of opposition by the well-organized cable TV industry, which credits deregulation for the industry’s incredible growth in recent years.