October 2008

Nielsen Monitor-Plus reports that since June 7, when the primaries ended, through the first week in September, Sen John McCain (R-AZ) has run 76,192 ads attacking Sen Barack Obama (D-IL) while Sen Obama has run 75, 246 ads attacking Sen McCain. Their focus has been Ohio (14, 397 McCain ads, 11, 037 Obama ads), Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The McCain campaign has now shifted virtually 100 percent of his national ad spending into negative ads attacking Obama, a detailed breakdown of his ad buys reveals. By contrast, the Obama campaign is devoting less than half of its overall ad spending to ads attacking McCain. More than half of its spending is going to a spot that doesn't once mention his foe. Evan Tracey, who tracks national ad spending for the Campaign Media Analysis Group, says, Obama is now outspending McCain by nearly two to one on the air -- Obama is spending $2.4 million per week, and McCain is spending $1.3 million weekly.

[Commentary] Sometime next year, the new Administration will start to figure out a plan for collecting information about where broadband is, and how to increase deployment. The delay will be necessary because while Congress passed the bill to improve broadband data collection, S. 1492, there isn't any money actually set aside to pay for the program. Until appropriations bills are passed for the next fiscal year, FY 2010, which starts Oct. 1, 2009, there won't be any money. As a result, it could be calendar year 2010 before any program gets going. The legislation is by no means a broadband policy any more than a thermometer is a cure for an illness. Having some measurement of a problem is good. However, there are some parts to the bill that raise questions about how effective the data mapping and broadband cheerleading in the bill will be. However, the advantage of having such a delay in implementation is that there will be lots of work to be done in order to make this program useful.

[Commentary] Jessell has no love for Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin, who has all of five months left at the FCC's helm. OK, a little love. Instead of pushing the same old discredited localism ideas that have been haunting broadcasting for decades -- programming quotas, ascertainment and such -- Chairman Martin has come up with an idea that could, in theory, yield some programming that could actually enhance the service that stations provide. The trouble is, the proposal still puts the FCC where it doesn't belong: in the middle of TV stations' decisionmaking on news and programming. Any news dollar a station spends on an FCC-approved independent news bureau is one less dollar spent on something else, perhaps another local producer or reporter. The FCC is, in effect, directing stations' news priorities. An unintended consequence of shifting resources to state issues may be the loss of local coverage — hardly the aim of the FCC's localism proceeding.

Judge Victoria Roberts of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division has ruled that Michigan cities will be able to continue to prevent the migration of their public, educational and government channels into the 900-channel area at least until the Federal Communications Commission sets policy on the treatment of such channels. In a dispute between Comcast and a number of cities, Judge Roberts ruled that when there is a conflict between state and federal law, the state is preempted and federal law specifies that local franchisees can regulate PEG channels. However, she offered, many other issues raised in the suit are not addressed by federal law. The cities have specific language in community franchises that bar the movement of PEG channels without the prior permission of the local franchising authority; or language that bars extra charges to subscribers in order to receive PEG programming.