Minorities Have a Stake in HDTV Fight

Wired magazine and several daily newspapers saw a "giveaway" in the FCC's plan to provide broadcasters with free spectrum allocations for high-definition TV channels. They're right about the economic returns of an auction, but the FCC decided to "loan" the frequencies for two years, and to demand rapid upgrading to digital TV.

Black Entertainment Television chief Robert Johnson makes an even stronger point about exclusion of minorities from ownership opportunities in this new, potentially lucrative enterprise. Johnson says part of the spectrum should be set aside for groups long excluded from equal participation in the ownership of commercial TV.

The computer industry, for its part, says HDTV transmissions should be computer-friendly. Doing things the old way excludes new uses, such as co-transmission of Internet Web pages. And computer makers want to sell lots of new, TV-capable PCs.

Congress must resolve the conflict, and it should force both sides to address the concerns of minority broadcasters such as Johnson, letting them become owners of major broadcast franchises and originators of content in Web simulcasts, instead of treating them as afterthoughts and also-rans. Congress should force the FCC to auction the new channels, with provisions for minority inclusion.

A new kind of higher-frequency, digital cell-TV broadcasting may offer a partial solution. If provisions are made for minority ownership of the new Local Multipoint Distribution Service channels, being tested in Brooklyn, New York, Johnson and other minority-led broadcasters could have a real shot at competing with the broadcast elite. Using what Business Week called "a huge swath of radio spectrum at a frequency of 28 gigahertz nowhere near other radio signals it can provide Internet access, videoconferencing, and, most significantly, phone service," the digital, two-way channels could open up the Web and other interactive services not to mention 200-channel broadcast cable to the inner-city families now being left off everyone else's service agenda.