THE PLOWBOY INTERVIEW

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ROBERT COOPER

TELEVISON. . .
A MEDIUM FOR-AND BY-THE PEOPLE

In this issue of MOTHER, our serialization of Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television comes to an end. There's no doubt that Jerry Mander's thinking has-as evidenced by mounds of correspondence-had a profound effect on thousands of MOTHER's readers, but ma other good folks have written to maintain that we shouldn't confuse the medium with the message...that the biggest problem with TV is programming...and that television, as a people's medium, could be a source of positive good in the human community.

One such reader is Robert B. Cooper, Jr. Bob is a pioneer in developingtechnology for the home reception of satellite television, and he claims that the orbiting signal-bouncers offer a real chance for folks to take control of this country's major medium of entertainment and information. In order to explore his views on how television got to where it is-and to examine what can be done to remedy the situation-MOTHER staffer Peter Hemingson traveled to Cooper's Oklahoma home.

The edited transcript that follows-which summarizes more than five hours of discussion-presents a thoughtful alternative to Jerry Mander's call for the elimination of television. If Cooper is right-and many think that he is-the answer to our "television problem" may well be toexpand the use of TV rather than do away with it.

PLOWBOY : Mr. Cooper, I certainly didn't have any difficulty spotting your home as I drove up. The tall radio towers in the back yard...the television antennas stacked on the roof of the house...and that big, white 20-foot dish antenna in the side yard make your place pretty hard to miss! You must have a doctor's degree in electrical engineering to operate all that equipment.

COOPER : No, I don't. My academic training is in broadcast journalism. Actually, I learned the electronics that I know working as an amateur radio operator when I was a boy...and my interest in television began about the same time.

Back in 1950—when my family lived in Ithaca, New York-television was something we'd only heard about. The nearest station was more than 100 miles away, and no one in town had a receiver.

Then one day my dad came back from a business trip with a little seven-inch-screen Hallicrafters TV tucked into his luggage...and I was hooked. Before long, we built a 100-foot antenna tower on our hilltop...and, every second Thursday, reception was good enough for us to see a misty Kate Smith singing about the moon coming over the mountain!

Since we were the only people in the county who had television, all the local radio dealers would use our antenna to test the latest videos...hoping to find one sensitive enough to sell in our area. Sometimes there were five or six TV's-all loaners-lined up in our living room. As you can imagine, I became totally immersed in the medium. Since that time I've never been very far away from television...and for the past 20 years, I've edited cable TV trade journals.

PLOWBOY : You've been quoted as saying that television programming may well be shameless and beyond defending. How did the situation get so bad?

COOPER : Well, to understand how we've ended up with what Nicholas Johnson the maverick former FCC commissioner—called "bubble gum for the mind", we need to review the history of the medium. The problem has technological, political, and economic roots...but the technology, of course, came first.

At the end of the Second World War, the Federal Communications Commission reevaluated the original standards it had set for television and decided to assign a certain block of frequencies in the VHF-or very high frequency-band to the service. The frequencies would-it was further planned-be broken up into 12 channels. Now, at the time, there were only two requirements for establishing a TV station: First, you had to have enough money to keep the station on the air while it was becoming established...and second, the channel that you picked for the station could not interfere with anyone's ability to receive other stations.

The engineering theory of the day said that TV signals could not travel for more than 50 miles. However, as new stations came on, reality soon caught up with theory. By 1948, the FCC was being swamped with complaints from angry viewers, each of whom had paid at least $300 for a television set that now, because of excessive interference, seemed useless. In response, the commission froze the number of authorized TV stations at 107—those that had already been approved and the freeze lasted until 1952.

PLOWBOY : Did the FCC take any steps to resolve reception problems at that time?

COOPER : Well, it considered a variety of proposals...but-in the meantime the stations that had been lucky enough to be licensed before their number was frozen became so firmly established that there was no way they could ever become threatened commercially. In a few cities, like New York and Los Angeles, there were competing stations...but most urban areas had just one television station, and some towns-such as Denver, Colorado and Portland, Oregon-had none at all.

PLOWBOY : It sounds as if a decision that had been made essentially for technological reasons had some pretty important economic results, as well.

COOPER : The effects were not only economic, but also political. The original 107 television stations quickly realized that they were enormously important to members of Congress, and that understanding soon led to the government's-including the FCC's-kid glove treatment of the interests of the existing stations. In fact, the commissioners eventually worked out a plan that was guaranteed to please only the established stations.

They decided that-because of technical limitations—12 channels of television were just not enough to give everyone in the country interference-free viewing. So they opened up what is now called the UHF-or ultra high frequency-band for television channels 14 to 83...and decided that, once the freeze was over, applications would be taken for both VHF and UHF stations.

PLOWBOY : That doesn't sound like a bad notion.

COOPER : It wouldn't have been, if anyone around at the time had had any experience with UHF. Unfortunately, there'd been almost no experimentation with ultra high frequency transmission at all. Nobody knew what would be required to build a UHF receiver-ordinary VHF machines couldn't receive UHF-and no one knew what was going to be involved in building UHF antennas, either! Worse yet, most cities were allotted just three VHF channels. Given the difficulties with UHF, the VHF allocation system practically guaranteed that there would be no more than three networks.

PLOWBOY : Didn't the FCC realize that it wasin effect-limiting television to three major sources of programming?

COOPER : Well, Dr. Allen B. Dumont—a television pioneer who developed the mass production picture tube and who had a five-station network that was as big as CBS in 1950-testified that the FCC was making a big mistake in its channel allocation program. Dumont knew UHF wouldn't be able to compete with VHF. He predicted that network affiliations would go to the stations that people could receive on their existing receivers, and that most UHF stations cut off from the major sources of programming and stuck with weak signals that almost nobody could receive-would fail. And he was right. Something like 400 UHF stations were built and put on the air in the early fifties...but hardly any of them managed to succeed.

Dumont actually believed in UHF, but he saw that it would be fatal to the new service if the FCC allotted both VHF and UHF channels to one city. He suggested that, when there wasn't room for several VHF stations in a city that already had one pre-freeze station, then all that area's broadcasters-including the pre-freeze station-should be moved to UHF. Under such a system, one station wouldn't have had any inherent advantage over the others.

Dumont lost...and he became so angry as a result that he closed his network down!

PLOWBOY : With so many UHF stations coming on the air and then failing, many people must have wasted money buying adapters and antennas that soon proved useless.

COOPER : Yes, but even though the monetary losses were enormous, other losses to the viewing public were even greater...because we lost our chance to have truly local television.

PLOWBOY : And that loss had programming implications, too.

COOPER : Of course it did. Because we're limited to controlled, network-centered broadcasting, we have to suffer such insanities as having a program canceled even when it's drawing twenty million viewers. If you look at the top programs, you'll see that-with the occasional exception of the Super-bowl or a hit movie their ratings are separated by miniscule amounts...fractions of a point. Often there's a difference of just a few million viewer-homes between the highest- and the lowest-rated programs that are on the air in the same time slot...but the show that's third is going to get canceled.

PLOWBOY : And once the ratings became all that mattered, the quality of the programs began to decline.

COOPER : Sure. If millions of folks can be disenfranchised by programming decisions, simply because they're slightly in the minority, then the networks have to make sure that they attract a clear majority with their shows. And the easiest way to do that is to reduce the quality of the programs...to shoot for the lowest common intellectual denominator.

PLOWBOY : Isn't there any way out of the ratings bind?

COOPER : If you take the technical problems caused by the fact that there are a limited number of channels available in any given area, and add to those hassles the sheer economic and political power of the groups that control the channels, you'll see that the system we have today is about all we can expect from the "public" airwaves. However, there'd clearly be room for additional competition, if only there were spectrum space available to the competitors.

PLOWBOY : Doesn't cable television offer such space?

COOPER : In many ways, it does. Cable or CATV—was developed to distribute over-the-air television signals to areas that couldn't get adequate reception.

It began when some local entrepreneur raised a community antenna-sensitive enough to pick up a distant signal-on the highest hill in town, and then ran the signal to subscribers through a cable. You know, the earliest cable systems probably were the perfect embodiment of American ingenuity...but nobody liked them except the subscribers. The broadcasters and movie theater owners feared cable terribly...and such people reacted by harassing the community antenna companies in every way possible.

PLOWBOY : Cable must have appeared to be pretty potent competition!

COOPER : Well, it didn't look imposing right away. Remember that-after the freeze was over the typical FCC allocation for a good-sized city was three commercial VHF channels, one reserved educational channel, and some UHF frequencies. When cable first came along, it simply extended the reach of the existing stations, making it possible to get television on the west side of a mountain, for instance, as well as on the east side.

Until the late 1950's, cable could deliver only three channels...and that usually meant that the nearest network stations were piped in. But then a clever engineer came along and discovered a way to deliver jive channels on the cable. Most cities didn't have independent stations to fill the vacancies, so the cable companies often brought in more network stations from a different market.

By the early 1960's, it was technically possible to bring 12channels of television into homes with the cable...and people in that business knew they'd better find some way other than more network duplication-to fill those channels. Cable systems that were within reach of independent stations added them to the menu...and isolated CATV systems got together as groups and built microwave relays to send distant independent signals from Los Angeles to as far as El Paso, or from New York to Ohio.

PLOWBOY : It sounds as if they'd found a way to break the network bottleneck!

COOPER : Yes, they had. The cable operators, through their own creative ingenuity, had done what the FCC had been incapable of doing back in 1952...they had created diversified programming.

PLOWBOY : And then the big broadcasters began to howl?

COOPER : Yes, that's right. When CATV started to pipe in distant independent signals, the considerable political clout of the broadcasters who now numbered something like 650 VHF stations-was brought to bear on the FCC.

Take, for example, the case of cable TV in Santa Barbara, California. The western city had been allocated just one VHF (network) channel. Santa Maria, up the coast, was also given a VHF outlet. On paper, the two cities constituted a combined market. Unfortunately, however, about half the people in Santa Barbara lived "over the hill"-surrounded by geographical barriers-and couldn't receive the Santa Maria station...and about 90% of the people in Santa Maria were unable to see the Santa Barbara transmissions. In other words, comparatively few homes could receive both the CBS and ABC stations.

So a CATV firm wired Santa Barbara with a modern 12-channel cable system, and-to fill the extra spaces on the dial it"imported" the signals of independent Los Angeles stations. The broadcasters complained to the FCC that the cable company was giving people a choice of programming in Santa Barbara...and claimed that the VHF station in the California town would soon be forced off the air as a result.

PLOWBOY : What happened?

COOPER : The FCC ruled that it had no right to regulate cable TV. As for the "threat" posed by that particular cable system...here it is 1980, and Santa Barbara's television station is still very much on the air.

PLOWBOY : Why hasn't cable become more of an alternative to broadcast television, then?

COOPER : Well, the nature of cable ownership changed substantially during the 1960's. The industry had originally been made up of mom and-pop kinds of businesses, locally owned and operated. But when the broadcasters and others saw the multi-channel capability that cable offered, they began buying up the systems.

Teleprompter, one of the first such super-companies, introduced the concept of maintaining corporate headquarters in New York and sending managers into the field to supervise local companies. So CATV became absentee-owned and absentee-operated...and it became a big business with large amounts of money behind it.

PLOWBOY : That couldn't have made the broadcast people feel very secure.

COOPER : It didn't ... and I always blame the greed of the large cable operators-with their glittery press agent releases-for what happened to CATV The

FCC jumped on it with both feet.

PLOWBOY: But I thought the FCC had ruled that it had no jurisdiction over cable.

COOPER: It did so rule... several times . But the broadcasters kept complaining and exerting political pressure...and finally, in 1968, the FCC decided to study the question again. A commission attorney came up with a phrase in the Communications Act of 1934which is the FCC's charter-stating that the commission had the right to regulate broadcasting and those things that are "ancillary" to broadcasting. The FCC decided that the wording did put cable systems under its jurisdiction...and set out to look for a test case.