Of the institute. She broke her leg when she and her son or daughter were shopping and a shoplifter knocked them over. Alex has done a fabulous job running the institute. I want to think the other georgetown students gathered by amy schwartzman. The otherto thank georgetown students gathered by amy shorts mentored what are we i want to thank the other georgetown students gathered by amy schwartzman. In may, Sinclair Broadcast Group announced its intention. It is seeking approval on the department of justice for the merger, which if consummated will result in sinclair owning 233 stations covering 72 of american viewers. The next largest will have 70 fewer stations. At the same time, the fcc will come out tomorrow including newspaper broadcast, the tv radio and the local tv. How many of you know what a uhf station is . Anybody under the age of 40 now . I saw three hands. We will have an opportunity to talk about that a little later and whether that was a rule that should have been reinstated. The other thing the fcc did was eliminate the main studio which requires a local broadcaster to maintain a studio in its community of license. Butounds like an old rule, when you combine consolidation with the getting rid of the needs to have a presence in the local community, it is pretty meaningful. These issues are extremely timely with the vote coming tomorrow. We will talk about whether this merger is in the Public Interest and whether media ownership rules make sense in this day and age when you have many multiple outlets, 500 cable channels and the internet. Let me talk about how today is going to go. Sender blumenthal is not here yet. When he comes, we will let him speak regardless of what we are doing. Debate start off with a that will focus largely on the ownership rules, not so much on the merger. Then, we will follow with the panel and then we will have audience question and answer. There are cards on your seats. I will not call on people. Hat is bad coul raise your hand and walk around and triple who you are show people who you are. Folks will stay afterwards and answer more questions. Lets start with the debate. It was 902 this morning, i got i got anm john email from john. Thankfully, he, brought in his plays a fantastic to life known for years thankfully, he brought in his plays a fantastic substitute i have known for years. In his place a fantastic substitute i have known for years. Each debater will have seven minutes to debate. Whoever goes first will have another two minutes to respond. David, the floor is all yours. Thank you. I have to say again not the only one whos grateful that jerry showed up. I am, too. He literally got lastminute notice of this and has stepped in and that deserves our thanks. Now, with that, i would like to take him on. [laughter] will hear a lot today and tomorrow about how the world has changed. The world has changed since the ownership rules were first promulgated that was a little bit ago. Theres the internet, cable tv, look at all the Different Social Media platforms. Therefore, these antiquated, oldfashioned broadcast rules have got to go. That is the only way we can have free over the air broadcast tv. That is the only way to survive in the modern world. If that is where the story ended, i would have to concede, you win. Thank you. [laughter] fortunately, thats not where the story ends because thats not where the story began. The story begin with broadcasters in this country got a great deal. It was a trade. We the American People are going to give you free spectrum licenses, the best that there is in every single market. Not only that commit these spectrum licenses that are worth , unders of dollars today todays Law Committee can sell them if you want and get billions of dollars more, free from the United States taxpayer. The laws passed in this institution give broadcasters even more value. You the broadcaster are guaranteed distribution on cable and satellite tv. Show me a business person who would not love that deal. Guaranteed distribution of your product in law. You are given a legal monopoly under the copyright law to provide network programming. Youre the only one permitted to do so. If i want it by a newspaper from to buy a newspaper from another city i can go and find a newspaper from another city. I can find content from anywhere in the world, but not with broadcast tv. We the american taxpayer give is there anyers possible way to get some of that additional revenue from these licenses . Wouldve we charge a fee for using this publicpriva propert . No, say the broadcasters. No fees. We want it for free as we always had. The American People are supposed to get something in return. We get free over the air programming. Its for free. Number two, we get local news, weather, and sports. That is important. Localism. We get that as a Public Service from the broadcaster. The other thing we are supposed , we are supposed to get a wide variety of perspective, diversity of a viewpoint diverse the of viewpoint oferse t diversity viewpoint. We say to the broadcasters, take it all. Have it for free, on us, provided we get those things back. It has actually played out that way even in the midst of this vast market with all these different choices and all these different forms of technology. 82 of americans across all age groups trust local broadcasts the most for local news. Local broadcasts trust the most for local news. Found that also people trust their local broadcast news more than they trust their own family. In my view, if you want all the freebies, it has to come with the papers and return in return. You have to provide local news and you have to provide a variety of voices. If you want to take away the restrictions, that is fine, just give back all the goodies youve gotten in return. We will get rid of these regulations but youre not going to have must carry anymore or the copyright exclusivity anymore and guess what . Broadcasters hated it. We are going to ask ourselves what happens when broadcasters get bigger. I will give you a preview. Sinclair fires local reporters and local sportscasters and local staff and since those functions to baltimore. Buy in thismpt to tribune, which attempts to buy this transaction has a better track record. , when we did a study of local news at both companies and found that the top three stations that provide local news to both companies provide twice as much. Sinclair must prove to you today that ive been getting bigger, the local news that they provide is either going to be just as good or even better. What are we the American People getting from this bargain . Why should these ownership limits be lifted so they can get even bigger . It doesnt work out very well for the American People. Jerry . Thanks, david. Thank you for the invitation. I thought about shaving my head today to emulate my friend did i dont think i could pull it off. [laughter] i apologize if i havent read all the pleadings in this proceeding. I first worked for chairman whiteley and commissioner lee back in 1975 through the first staff time reviewing the station sales in the mid1970s to my time with the chairman and the Reagan Administration with some of the rules in the 1980s to cope with them advising the owners in the past 30 years the. The question today is whether we need fcc rules limiting broadcast ownership in the age of ubiquitous, highresolution internet streaming, new overthetop services and more competition than ever from mbpd distribution. We do not. Antitrust principles are more than adequate to government the consolidation in Television Broadcasting. We dont need separate rules agencies with arbitrary definitions of competition and diversity all of which were chosen decades ago as political compromises rather than in response to the rigorous thoughts about how this works. Two basic premises guide my views. I believe a free over the air broadcasting is a vital tr national asset. A treasure, even. I dont take it for granted. Rge you to consider this it free over the air broadcasting did not exist and the fcc allocated spectrum for it today, would investors provide capital and would the new broadcasters be able to out did outbid internet or a channel platforms to acquire the programming cost and produce hours and hours of life news in every market . That is day in and day out. And make it available for free . Nobody else does these things today. I understand that theres no free lunch. To finance over the air Television Broadcasting by allowing broadcasters to compete for revenue in the marketplace. The decision to finance free over the air broadcasting with profits earned in the marketplace means that broadcasters cannot take anything for granted. They have to earn their supply of programming by paying for it. Nobody requires a cbs stations to broadcast nfl games. Nobody requires the nfl to distribute is programming on a platform that is available for free. Games to nbc when espn will pay more. I hear typical arguments against broadcast consolidation the one fact that never get s the simple premise that broadcasters have compete against regulators they will say broadcasters have special Public Interest obligations and they got their spectrum for free and that justifies limits on control. One does not follow the other. That broadcasters got their spectrum for free and that justifies ownership regulations thwart the competitiveness drives me crazy. Very few stations are in the hands of the licensees. To the incumbent phone companies for free with no Public Interest of response abilities. Licenses issued for free have changed hands to buyers who paid market price pai. How they got there licenses is an intellectual non sequitur. The fccs ownership rules have perverse and very harmful effects in the market. I was an active witness in the absurd unintended consequence of making washington, d. C. A monopoly newspaper town when them separate the washington star from wj late tv and it died. Nationally, we do not need ownership caps because those particular rules prevent new competition to existing platforms. As preston pointed out in his washington journal oped they rules have the effect of freezing National Television to abc, cbs and fox they have 100 . Why shouldnt others have the same option . Locally, we dont need ownership restrictions, either, because we need to allow those that are willing to invest in local markets to organize in a way that allowed them to be as profitable as computing platforms. Theits commensurate with profits of computing competing platforms are not just good, they are essential even if you believe broadcast ownership should be regulated beyond antitrust. I would object that as preposterous to restrictions on the books written at the time people learned of the pearl harbor bombings from the over the air networks before facebook, google, amazon, netflix, directv. When at t was a longdistance provider. Whether that is the best framework for the 21st century. I sometimes feel like rip van winkle. Heads up. The world has changed. [laughter] get over it. The u. S. Shows the marketplace that was easy when broadcasters had no competitive competition except for each other. Restrictive ownership limits have bad consequences but they were not existential threats. If you want the marketplace to find a way to bring you local news, nfl games, highcost scripted programming for everyone for free, you have to let the marketplace figure out how to do it because programmers are going to sell to the highest bidder every time coming and the dutch every single time every single time and the government isnt going to subsidize. Thank you. Jerryn i said i was happy is here, i take it all back. You ended by saying the marketplace will figure it out and im coming back to the point i made earlier if this were the real marketplace the government would have no role whatsoever as. But as long as they have the thumb on the scale providing guaranteed distribution and yes, free licenses at the time of her the competitors have to buy them, we and the American People get something in return. It is an anthology i use all the time. 29 of the 32 nfl stadiums in the country were built with taxpayer money. That is your money and it went right into the pocket of a billionaire owner and what do you get in return for that flex . 400 per family or maybe it gets blocked altogether or maybe you have to subscribe to the network to get it. That is not right. As long as the American Public is giving something to the industry we have every right to ask for something in return even if it isnt efficient from the economic standpoint. I think the way to handle the debate is to say okay, we do want free over the air broadcasting and we do want localism and we want things to be available to the public for free. Those are all great things but you only get to argue that the rules should go if you can show somehow theres a disconnect between the value we get in the diversity of voices on the one platform that is most for local news, broadcast and so i see nothing and i mean zero in the filings submitted that would show that. In fact, every time one of us who is opposing this merger suggests a question that sinclair could answer like please show was how your local news hiring an content compares to the rest of the industry or even just compares to tribune, the company want to buy, crickets. No answer, except maybe platitudes like we are going to bring local basketball or local high school basketball. That is great if i can compare it to the rest of the industry. Once again, we can talk about the free market all day long, but as long as uncle sam and us taxpayers are subsidizing this industry, we get a say and we want local news and local diversity. Debaters ave our hand. [applause] when sender blumenthal arrives,lumenthal we will give him the podium. Ive been corrected. Let me briefly introduce the speakers and i believe that their longer bios are on the georgetown website. They are easy to find in any search engine. Look them up, because they are all terrific folks. I feel very lucky to be able to sit here on this panel. We have to my right, rebecca hanson, Senior Vice President for strategy and policy for Sinclair Broadcast Group. Eddie lazarus come executive Vice President and general counsel for tribune corporation. This is a big deal to have the representatives of both major parties. We have carmen, the director for policy and Legal Affairs at the National Hispanic media coalition. To her right, jean winston, the president of the National Association of black owned broadcasters. To his right, my mentor and a longtime friend, Andy Schwarzman , who has been senior counselor and attorney at the Georgetown Institute for public representation. The first question i want to ask , we have two very stark visions. One of an industry that gets a lot of government and taxpayer benefits and therefore owes something to the public. One of the things they own is a diversity of voices. On the other hand, we have a scrappy competitor in a competitive marketplace. Where the free market ought to rule. Whatever needs to be done to make sure the broadcasters survive needs to be done. Would ask anybody in the panel if they wanted to respond. Which is it or is it a little bit of both . David paints a very rosy picture. A lot of the points he makes are not disputable. Except that we got our spectrum for free. There is an investment in thetrum regardless of origin of how the original licenses were issued. Picturer part of the that david painted is what you see before you. Its basically the environment in which we try to use these socalled government benefits to create a selfsustaining financially solid ability to deliver local news. Showing wheree broadcasters are in the middle in the media ecosystem in which we have to work. We have networks from whom we buy programming, 60 times our size, mbpds where we distribute our programming. Insummarize where we are this landscape, the major challenges in which we are supposed to provide these Public Benefits included major declines in our primary revenue source, which is local advertising, major consolidation of satellite and Cable Companies with nationwide footprints, consolidation of National Programming networks, increased cost of programming, including sports, fragmentation of our viewership and entry of so, i wanted to lay that out to set the scene that it is not as blackandwhite as david presented. I will just stop there. Andy, do you want to respond . Lets talk about our spectrum. We own the spectrum. The public owns the spectrum. We are the landlords, they are the tenants. Spectrumdoesnt own and when rebecca says, our spectrum, that is not so. What sinclair bought were licenses. Their licenses are for eight years and they expire. They have a right to render will if they earn it. Unfortunately the fcc rubberstamps that, but they are supposed to earn it with Public Service. But may know but make no mistake about it, we own the spectrum. What we are saying is because we, the public, on the spectrum, we can set appropriate conditions to make sure that spectrum is used to benefit the public. And that ensures competition and diversity. When jerry says, antitrust can ise care of it, antitrust about competition. The Communications Act is about diversity. Diversity is ultimately the most important thing we are tried to get here. So when i hear this, it is our spectrum, i just really, really, really, it just turns me upside down. We own it. They dont. Eddie and david, that i want to move on to other topics. Turn on your mic. Im not sure its really that fruitful a discussion to talk about who owns the spectrum quite the way we are. I think all local broadcasters feel obligations to their communities. Thats what sets local broadcasters apart. But the trade david described is not accurate. Theres no requirement that local broadcasters provide local news. Some of the biggest, many local broadcasters dont provide local news and the reason they dont is its hugely expensive. The people