Court Hears Dual Must Carry Case

An attorney for major cable networks Monday afternoon urged a federal appeals court to void a Federal Communications Commission rule that would effectively force cable operators to carry some local TV stations in both analog and digital formats for three years. Bruce Sokler, representing C-SPAN, Discovery Communications and four other cable programmers, said the duplicative carriage of some local TV stations would unnecessarily eat up cable's channel capacity, threatening the ability of cable networks to reach their audience. "There's still far more speakers than there is capacity," Sokler said during a 53-minute oral argument before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The cable programmers are in a hurry to see the rule struck down before it takes effect on Feb. 18, 2009, a day after all full-power TV stations are required to shut off their analog signals and go all-digital.