Ah, the latest “white paper” so obviously sponsored by the pay TV industry — this time, from Kressin Powers — a firm so confident in its paid-for arguments that not a single attorney attached their name to it. Always inspiring when a sweeping call for regulating your competitors arrives with all the accountability of an unsigned Post-it.
The paper opens with a misty-eyed fable about the “good old days” of broadcasting — a golden era when every station was an artisanal family shop, hand-carving antennas from local wood and personally delivering “viewpoint diversity” via rotary phone. It’s adorable. It’s also irrelevant. And it’s certainly not analysis.
From there, the authors deploy their favorite rhetorical trick: take a locally regulated, DMA-based marketplace, flatten it into a national pie chart, and declare the sky is falling. It’s like arguing there’s a national shortage of pizza because three chains own 40% of the ovens. Local stations compete locally. Broadcast viewers choose locally. Station advertisers buy locally.
But the authors are counting on readers not knowing that.
And the breathless warnings about “the big five station groups”? Congratulations to the white paper’s sponsors — they’ve discovered that a fragmented marketplace looks “concentrated” if you arbitrarily collapse it into a single national statistic. Meanwhile, back in the real world, most DMAs still have multiple independently owned stations competing for news talent, audience share, ad dollars and yes, retransmission deals. Which makes sense, because that’s how the system is designed to work.
Of course, this isn’t really about intra-broadcast competition.
It’s about cable and satellite operators desperate to avoid paying fair value for the programming their customers watch most. That’s been the case since Day One. The white paper’s melodrama about retransmission fees reads less like economic insight and more like a love letter to pay TV providers trying to keep carriage costs down, even as they continue raising consumer bills and shifting customers into their higher-margin broadband products. And of course, it says nothing of how much it costs broadcasters to acquire the content necessary to have a viable product in the first instance.
And when the paper warns of “anticompetitive” transactions? If genuine harm existed, the authors could show market-by-market evidence, the only place where harm could occur. Instead, we get sweeping national aggregates that mean nothing in a DMA-based regulatory system. It’s statistical cosplay dressed up as scholarship.
In the end, the document doesn’t read like a white paper at all. It reads like pay TV-funded fan fiction about restoring a broadcast world that hasn’t existed since Reagan’s first term, complete with cherry-picked numbers, nostalgia-soaked storytelling and an extraordinary amount of confidence for a report no one was willing to sign.
Cable and satellite operators may prefer a world where broadcasters provide the most-watched programming for free while pay TV providers keep charging consumers more each year. But packaging that wish list into an anonymous, selectively sourced white paper doesn’t make it credible.
If the pay TV lobby wants an actual policy debate, broadcasters welcome it.
But maybe next time, they’ll put their name on the document.
