2008 Not So Great For NAB's Rehr

David Rehr, president of the National Association of Broadcasters, must be unlucky.

After a string of NAB policy defeats in Washington, D.C., the airline industry goes and produces one of its worst flight backups in decades just as thousands prepare to jet to NAB’s annual convention in Las Vegas.

Maybe it’s because broadcasters and the airlines have something in common: Both use their political clout to gain access to the public airways and airwaves for free.

For Rehr, the first few months of 2008 have been a rotten time.

Among the setbacks:

– Rehr demanded that the FCC require DirecTV to provide local TV service in every market by the end of 2008 as a condition on the transfer of News Corp.’s 40% stake in the satellite TV provider to Liberty Media. Didn’t happen.

– Rehr demanded that DirecTV and Dish Network "provide empirical evidence to support their claims that they lack capacity to offer local-into-local service in high definition.” Didn’t happen. Instead, the FCC gave the DBS guys until 2013 to carry all stations in HD inside any market where they elect to carry any station’s signal in HD format.

– Rehr demanded rejection of the XM-Sirius satellite radio merger. Result: The Justice Department cleared the deal without a single condition. Can anyone recall another communications merger where Justice so willingly abetted the collapse of a market into monopoly?

DOJ’s antitrust division held up the Liberty Media-DirecTV deal for more than a year over Liberty chairman John Malone’s prospective control of both DirecTV and a puny cable system in Puerto Rico. DOJ feared pay-TV competition would shrink from three providers to two in the cable company’s limited franchise area.

A month later, DOJ allowed XM-Sirius to take the market from two to one. And as we all know, after an obligatory pillow fight for public consumption, the FCC will approve XM-Sirius in a few weeks.

Now, the latest bit of bad news for the NAB chief: FCC chairman Kevin Martin won’t be in Las Vegas next week for the annual NAB Show—and it’s not because he’s worried about being trapped circling the runway at McCarran airport for a few hours.

No, Martin needs to be on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to explain to the House Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee why the 700 MHz auction looks like it was set up to favor AT&T and Verizon and why he continues to believe it’s sound policy to outsource the creation of a public safety wireless broadband network to the private sector.

Query: When the Pentagon needs a new aircraft carrier, does the Chief of Naval Operations call on Reed Hundt or Morgan O’Brien to build it?

That a House hearing prevents the FCC chairman from attending the NAB convention is just one more sign of NAB’s diminishing power in Washington. In the old days, it would take the NAB president one phone call to postpone a House subcommittee hearing. Now, the NAB president hangs bed sheets with lobbying slogans from his office window and worries about the redesign of the trade group’s logo.

This comes just days after Martin found the time, on an impromptu basis, to visit a gathering of small cable operators at their annual summit (albeit in Washington, D.C.)  And he came calling with a gift: Martin told the small cable operators he wanted to give them permission to take TV stations’ pristine high-definition pictures and convert them to analog, in all must-carry cases. A few weeks ago, NAB lawyers called such a move “a blatant violation of the prohibition on material degradation” of HD signals.

There’s still plenty of unfinished business in 2008. NAB is trying to stop the unlicensed use of excess TV spectrum by low-power communications devices in a lobbying struggle against a coalition led by Google and Microsoft.

And Martin might advance new retransmission consent rules aimed at making sure cable and satellite TV providers are not subject to excessive cash and channel bundling and tying demands in order to get access to the signals of ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox.

These issues will be buzzing at the NAB show in Las Vegas, assuming the planes take off. If broadcasters get beat on white spaces and retransmission consent at the FCC, the skies could get really choppy for NAB’s pilot.