Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Desperate HousewivesFollow

First off, while "conservative groups" may well oppose it, Joph is right in that the Republican party as a group does support it (as does the Democrat party as well I'd assume).

I'd assume that the groups being mentioned are various Libertarian groups who tend to oppose any government expense/program on general principle. The Republican party is going to look at the benefits and costs and in this case, it does make a heck of a lot of sense.




Actually, while I'm not 100% on this, I seem to recall that there are laws/regulations/whatever requiring that "broadcast" TV be available to everyone. I'm sure if we dug into the bowels of the charters for the original broadcast networks, we could figure out the details, but basically due to the way it's regulated the network broadcasts have to be available to anyone with a basic TV. And since not all TVs can handle a digital signal, they can't redo the broadcast frequency ranges without making sure everyone can recieve the new ranges and decode them properly.


At least part of this probably has to do with tying the networks into the whole emergency broadcast system as well. Just like phone service, TV is considered part of that system and is subsidized to some extent as a result. So yeah. I think there is a requirement that everyone have access to this stuff. I couldn't nail down where the regulation or law is, but I would assume it must be there or they'd not go through the trouble of spending the 3 billion.

It's not at all as if they'd give a $3 billion subsidy to appease the kajillion dollar media industry with its various networks who make piles of money in advertising dollars and has a vested interest in making sure Joe Public can continue watching those ads.

You'd have to find me something legal in writing before I accept a federal mandate that we all get to watch TV. There's a vast difference between the signals being accessible to all and the government providing everyone with the equipment to access said signals. Sh[/i]it, if that's the case, I want someone from the government out soon fixing my house aerial. I can't help but think that if the subsidy [i]was part of a legal mandate, that bit would get some press time in the story as well and people wouldn't need to defend the subsidy as "good for the economy" but would just say "We gotta do this by law".

Last I checked, the EBS (well, it the EAS these days) worked just fine through the radio.

Edited, Mon Nov 14 17:18:05 2005 by Jophiel

Heh. I don't really feel like digging through some government legal documents. I'm just going with what makes sense.

I agree that they're not required to provide the equipment to recieve the broadcast, but this is a bit different. In this case, they are changing the standards in such a way that many TVs cannot recieve them anymore. So people who had already obtained the equipment on their own can no longer recieve the broadcasts.

By the same token, I'm reasonably sure there's a law somewhere that says that your phone company cannot arbitrarily change their network such that customer's phones no longer work without providing those customers a "fix" of some kind. I kinda see this the same way. The FCC is going to make a major change of the broadcast frequency ranges *and* the format that broadcast TV is sent in. This will render a number of TV sets that could previously recieve those broadcasts unable to do so anymore. I can see how they would be required to provide a means for people with older sets to still recieve the same service before they can do it.


Don't see how it matters much anyway. It's not like there's a huge uproar on either side on this issue.

3 letters:

PBS


I'll go out on another assumptive limb and say that there's a good number of Democrats in Congress who'd go apesh[/b]it if poor minority citizens could no longer see PBS on a 40 year old set powered by handcrank using old beat up rabbit ears for reception...

Psssst...

PBS is where the Liberals broadcast their mind control waves... Didn't you know?

Ahhhh... but since I moved, I don't have an aerial either and so I get no television and don't have to see Mrs. Bush at all! Hooray!

Or to put it another way, if you went on a night out, and took $100 with you, and your friend asks if he can borrow 20 cents to make a phone call, would you be outraged?