Digital TV May Squelch Minority-Owned Stations

Hundreds of low-power TV stations, which compose an important core of the nation’s minority-owned media outlets, may be forced off the air later this year by the launching of digital TV, a technology that offers super sharp pictures but consumes more airwaves.

The Federal Communication Commission is ordering the low-power stations, which have carved out a niche with ethnic shows, local sports and other programs over the last decade, to forfeit their frequencies to bigger stations for the new digital broadcasts.

“This is a spectrum grab by large companies, pure and simple,” said Charles Lore, general manager at low-power stations KNLA-TV Channel 68 and KNET-TV Channel 38 in Los Angeles.

At least one low-power TV station--WBA Channel 35 in Cincinnati--has already been knocked off the air during portions of the day by digital TV. As many as 20% of the nation’s 2,000 low-power stations might suffer a similar fate.

Meanwhile, more than 300 low-power stations--including at least three in the Los Angeles area--petitioned the FCC last week for new channel assignments in a desperate scramble to stay on the air. FCC officials are warning, however, that many stations will be forced off the air.

The looming crisis threatens to strike particularly hard at minority station owners and raises a politically delicate issue for the FCC, which began granting low-power licenses in the 1980s to diversify station ownership and programming.

More than 15% of low-power TV stations are minority-owned, compared with about 3% of full-power stations, according to industry estimates. But the percentage of low-power station owners is expected to fall significantly.

“It will be devastating,” said Benjamin Perez, president of Abacus Television, which owns two low-power TV stations in Pennsylvania. “Minority owners are concentrated in larger urban markets--and that’s where the spectrum is most crowded and where displacement by digital TV will happen most extensively.”

Low-Power Stations Have Thrived

Although low-power TV stations transmit at only a fraction of the 1,000 kilowatts used by the biggest full-power stations, some of them have grown into thriving enterprises.

KNLA and its multiethnic sister station KNET, for example, broadcast an eclectic mix, including a music show featuring KROQ deejay Rodney Bingenheimer and “Illegal Interns,” an award-winning series about the exploits of four Latino youths.

The two Los Angeles stations are among the nation’s most profitable low-power TV operations, earning several million dollars a year.

“I feel this is totally unfair,” said Lore, who contends that the transition to digital TV is producing more marketplace disruption than viewer benefits and will force his company to spend money looking for another channel assignment.

Minority groups could soon be left without a voice in TV broadcasting if the loss of low-power TV stations further erodes minority ownership and programming, according to David E. Honig, an attorney specializing in broadcast law and former head of the Minority Media Ownership and Employment Council in Washington.

Low-power stations carry most of the foreign language shows for Latino and Asian audiences, for example, which are deemed too small to attract the attention of larger stations.

“The importance of alternative media, especially small media, has become more critical in providing access for voices that would not otherwise be heard,” Honig added.

Minority ownership in the U.S. broadcasting industry has already fallen precipitously because media chains have been buying out smaller players, a trend that was accelerated when Congress eased media ownership rules under the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

The number of minority-owned stations fell to 322 last fall from 350 before passage of the Telecommunications Act, according to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an arm of the Commerce Department.

“We expect to see similar declines this year,” said Larry Irving, executive director of the agency. In addition to undermining stations owned by and programmed for minorities, the expected losses of low-power stations could leave thousands of viewers in outlying areas without local over-the-air TV service. That’s because some full-power stations use the low-power ones to retransmit their signals and extend their market reach.

Some Offer Full Network Schedules

Although some low-power stations are little more than electronic billboards--broadcasting home-shopping programs 24 hours a day--a few air full-time network TV schedules. ABC-TV affiliate WBND-TV in South Bend, Ind., is a low-power station, for instance. Others, like religious station WLPC-TV Channel 26 in Detroit, are picked up by cable TV systems and boast sizable audiences.

“We have widespread community support,” said Glenn Plummer, president of Christian TV Network, the black-owned company that operates WLPC. “We get more donations [from viewers] to run our station than the local public broadcasting channel.”

Meanwhile, in the nation’s capital, an estimated 350,000 Spanish-speaking residents face the prospect of losing the city’s two full-time Spanish-language stations: Univision Television Group affiliates WMDO-TV Channel 48 and WZGS-TV Channel 64.

“We are hopeful for a new channel assignment, but realistically there are only so many options available,” said Rudy Guernica, general manager of WMDO. “This is a period of great uncertainty. . . . “

FCC officials, including its new chairman, William E. Kennard, have cited promotion of minority ownership as one of their top policy goals, but they say the agency never gave out any concrete ownership rights for low-power stations. Under FCC rules, the stations are treated as secondary to full-power TV outlets.

“We aren’t offering any compensation for stations that are forced to shut down,” said Hossein Hashemzadeh, supervisory engineer with the FCC’s low-power television branch.

“Station owners can submit an application and tell us what channel they want to switch to,” Hashemzadeh said. “If we find something workable, we’ll go ahead and issue a new license. But in some larger cities--like New York or L.A.--there may not be enough [channel] frequencies to go around, and some stations are going to have to go off the air.”

For their part, high-power broadcast stations deny that they are engaged in a spectrum grab, saying the digital-TV plan is part of a national policy. They say they also are incurring high costs in instituting the digital format.

The TV airwave scramble stems from a controversial decision by the Clinton administration to give each of the nation’s 1,600 full-power television stations an extra channel for digital transmission.

During a decade-long transition, the stations will continue to broadcast analog signals while they move to a high-tech digital format that boasts movielike images and CD-quality sound.

In addition, the FCC is reassigning part of the spectrum--representing TV Channels 60 to 69--to local police and other public safety officials. It is auctioning the remaining frequencies for still-unspecified new communications services.

Cincinnati Station on Air Part Time

Although full-time digital TV broadcasting will begin in the nation’s top 10 TV markets this fall, low-power station WBA-TV in Cincinnati has already been booted off the air during part of the day by WLWT-TV, which has been broadcasting a digital TV signal on an experimental basis since February.

WBA-TV owner Elliott Block, who started his station with a $40,000 investment from his work filming weddings and bar mitzvahs, hopes the FCC will allow him to move WBA’s operations to vacant Channel 39 in Cincinnati so his station can resume full-time broadcasting.

“This transition to digital TV has been a lot of grief,” Block said. He added that even if the FCC grants his channel request, it will cost him about $40,000--or half of the station’s annual profits--to make the move.

George W. Harter, chief technical officer for Hardin & Associates, a Virginia Beach, Va., engineering firm, said low-power stations searching for suitable places to move their operations could spend $15,000 to more than $80,000.

But viewers are largely unaware of the problem, because station owners have refrained from trying to drum up support until the FCC determines which ones will survive the launching of digital TV.

The Community Broadcasters Assn., a small trade group, has met with Kennard and filed a petition asking the agency to upgrade the second-class status of the low-power TV industry.’

Although officials say both sides have taken steps to try to ameliorate the impact of digital TV on low-power television stations, FCC engineers say it is unlikely that all of the stations can be spared and that about 20% to 30% of low-power stations will go off the air.

“The solution to this problem is to give up equal status as [full-power] TV stations,” said Abacus Television’s Perez. “I expect the FCC will act on this CBA petition . . . but it’s probably too late already to save a lot of low-power stations in big markets.”