There are MANY dinosaurs living amongst us. Lumbering hulks from long-bygone eras.
Kept alive by idiotic, dinosaur D.C. policy. Because the dinosaurs spend a lot of money hiring a lot of lobbyists to ensure their dinosaur policy doesn’t go extinct, and they with it.
We speak today of one subset of dinosaurs: The government-subsidized broadcast networks.
(Ostensibly) private television – FOX, NBC, ABC, and CBS. And (ostensibly) private radio – the very many stations you hear all across the country.
And public television – PBS. And public radio – NPR.
We say “ostensibly” private because these networks are built upon the wireless spectrum to which the government granted them nearly-free exclusive access via broadcast licenses oh-so-many decades ago.
Nearly-free? “(Radio) stations serving large populations, such as six million or more, may face annual fees in the range of ten to twenty thousand dollars….Full-service television stations (also) determine their annual fee using a population-based methodology based on the number of people within the station’s projected service contour.”
By way of comparison, cellular phone companies use the same wireless spectrum. They, too, need exclusive access via government license. Except they pay through the nose for it via government spectrum auctions. The last auction brought in $19.12 billion.
Spectrum is a finite resource. And it exists on a spectrum (SWIDT?) of usefulness. Think of a Monopoly board. Some spectrum is Boardwalk and Park Place. Some is Mediterranean and Baltic Avenue. And the full range in between.
The better the spectrum, the more you can do with it. And as we pile more and more upon more and more of it, the free ride the broadcasters get starts looking more and more like a bad deal for the rest of us.
Now I realize broadcast television only uses about 6 megahertz (MHz) of spectrum. That ain’t a lot. Terrestrial radio uses more, between 88 MHz and 108 MHz.
In wireless broadband terms, none of that is a whole lot. T-Mobile and AT&T currently own the most licensed spectrum amongst the wireless companies – each own about 375 MHz.
And the U.S. government owns the majority of U.S. spectrum. About 60 percent of it. And a lot of that is higher-to-high-end stuff.
So the Broadcasters understandably point to their small spectrum share and the government’s large share and say, “Why are you even looking at us?”
A perfectly fair question. And the Broadcasters spend a LOT of lobby money asking it.
The chief lobby for the (ostensibly) private broadcasters is the National Association of Broadcasters, which, in 2024 alone, spent $11,920,000 lobbying D.C., making it that year’s 25th largest lobbying group (per Open Secrets).
PBS and NPR are straight-up government media. They not only get the spectrum basically free, they get government cash on top of it. Government broadcasters using government money to hire lobbyists to lobby government would be gaudy – and is almost wholly unnecessary.
But all of this begs a question: Does anyone think we, in 2026, suffer from a dearth of choice when it comes to news and entertainment?
Video: There are 168 hours in a week. Grok informs me – via a rough calculation – that somewhere between 100 and 115 hours of viewing content is created globally per week. The vast majority of it by-and-for Internet streaming services. That should get you through your weekend.
Some octo- and nonagenarians might still wait to get their news from the broadcast networks. My octogenarian parents don’t. They have smartphones and tablets and get omnidirectional news delivered to them all day, every day.
In fact, 98-plus percent of the U.S. had high-speed Internet access, including via wireless-cellular connections, WAY back in 2015. Don’t believe me? Go WAY back and ask then-President Barack Obama.
Which means we’ve been getting omnidirectional news delivered to us all day, every day, for more than a decade.
Audio: Grok informs that the major streaming services host over 253 million songs. And that 106,000 new songs are uploaded every day.
(And now we have the abomination that is Artificial Intelligence (AI) music. So the streaming services can now bypass paying real artists the rip-off rates they pay them.)
Grok also informs that there are 4.5 million to 4.7 million podcasts registered worldwide. Apple Podcasts alone hosts 117 million published podcast episodes, with 26-30 million new episodes uploaded each year.
All in, that is today, very conservatively, a minimum of 75 million hours of published podcast content, which represents non-stop listening for thousands of years.
So I’m not sure why, in the midst of this titanic ecosystem of content, we still have these broadcast dinosaurs making MANY billions of dollars and not paying anything for the spectrum that makes it all possible.
Am I calling for a mass eviction of broadcasters from their nearly-free spectrum? I am not.
There is no immediate need for access to their spectrum. And Lord knows many other people and I have been trying desperately for years to get the majority-holding government off their giant rumpuses and free up more spectrum for private use.
And I wish not to place all our eggs into the Internet basket. There should always be some over-the-air television and radio available in the event of a mass Internet crashout or other catastrophic events.
But there will come a day, WAY in the future, to be sure, where we will start to need access to that spectrum.
And in the meantime, aren’t the broadcasters making all of that money – via nearly-free access to spectrum, for which everyone else pays through the nose – a little obscene?
I certainly think it is.