 Well, welcome to the New America Foundation. My name is Michael Calabrese. I direct the Wireless Future Project here, which is part of our larger Open Technology Initiative. And this event is also sponsored by our Media Policy Initiative. And Tom Glazer had wanted to be here, but he has a new member of his family as of just yesterday. His new daughter held off just long enough that he's at home nesting, I think by now, or maybe just leaving the hospital, who knows. So if Tom's on the webcast, congratulations. So this is our event on media transparency, political ads, and the future of public interest obligations, because we do want to put it in this larger context. We are webcastings. So there's a larger number of folks on the web. Welcome to all of you. And we are also live tweeting, Patrick Lucy, from the back corner there. The hashtag is media transparency. And we'd also encourage you to follow us at New America OTI, one word, at New America OTI just for the future. And please turn off cell phones, and especially the panel, because we can get feedback in the microphones. And when we get to the audience, we hope we'll get some comments and questions from you all. Microphone will go around, but please let us know who you are, who you're with when we do that. I should note at the outset that we did invite the National Association of Broadcasters and some other broadcasters to participate. Unfortunately, at the time we set the date, this was my mistake, I didn't realize that their show, their show in Las Vegas, is this week running all the way up till today. And so they finally said they didn't have any of their top people whose flights were going to get back in today in time to participate. On the other hand, having the NAB show going on this week has provided some really interesting context for this. In fact, the news reports flowing back from Las Vegas point up the somewhat surreal nature of this debate about broadcast, what obligations broadcasters owe the public in return for free use of the airwaves. So on the one hand, earlier this week we saw Chairman Genekowski virtually pleading with local broadcast stations to get off the air, to stop serving the public, and to accept money in exchange for all or at least half of their spectrum allocations so that we can have an incentive auction to provide more capacity to wireless carriers for smartphones and tablets and all the things that are eating bandwidth at just this unprecedented pace. So while Chairman Genekowski was saying his phone was ringing off the hook with broadcasters wanting to sell their patrimony, NAB CEO Gordon Smith was saying that he couldn't count on even one hand how many broadcasters were really interested in selling out. At the same time, broadcasters also kind of flowing back is from Vegas is we hear a staunch opposition to what we're going to talk about today. The FCC's proposed rule requiring stations to put their public inspection file online so that the public can access it more easily. So I'll leave it to our panelists to discuss the pros, cons, and realities of moving the public inspection file online. But I did want to note before we begin that this isn't only about disclosing political ads, which is getting all the publicity and a line of attack along the lines of, well, don't we have a federal election commission for that, not an FCC? And I'm sure some of our speakers will address that. But it's important to realize that the public inspection file includes not just the political file, which includes that information, but also the children's television programming reports, each station's equal opportunity file, the news and public affairs issues and programming less, and a number of other disclosures related to what traditionally have been public interest obligations. So we'll go straight down the line for some relatively short opening remarks and then move to some discussion, let the panelists respond to what they've heard from each other. I may have a question or two, and then we'll open it to the audience and finish by roughly 145. So with that, there was a handout with the detailed bio information on our speakers. So I'll be short in introducing each one, but first up will be Stephen Waldman, who is a senior media policy scholar at the Columbia Journalism School in New York. And I think, as most of you I'm sure know, Stephen served as the lead author and chairman of the working group that delivered the 2011 FCC white paper, The Information Needs of Communities, which included a recommendation about modernizing the public interest obligations of broadcasters. Stephen. Thank you very much for having this. The timing could not be better. An obvious disclaimer, which is I don't work at the FCC anymore, so these are my own views and shouldn't be construed as coming from the FCC. We ended up making this recommendation for two sort of different reasons. One had to do with an assessment of the public interest obligations of broadcasters and an assessment of the history. And we basically kind of said, when you look at what the public interest compact was, the broadcasters got the spectrum from the public originally for free, and in exchange, they were supposed to serve the public in certain ways. That definition of how they would do that has changed over the years, which we went through. And we basically said, let's be honest, the system is not working. At least it's not working in the sense of the threat of a license renewal or denial as a way of prodding certain behaviors at this point. We estimated there were about 100,000 license renewal applications that the FCC had looked at in 70 years. In only four cases did the FCC denial license on the basis of failure to meet a community public interest obligation, none in the last 30 years. So we looked at that and said, there's a couple options. You can double down on the approach that the agency took in the 60s and 70s, have strict program guidelines, and start denying licenses if they don't meet them. We did not recommend that path for various practical and constitutional reasons that I can talk about if you want. But we said disclosure and transparency is potentially a more useful tool than it used to be because of the internet. And so let's look at it at a minimum. Not that this is going to transform the world. Let's look at a minimum, taking the public file that is already being kept in a filing cabinet and putting it online. The other thread that led in the same direction is the real thrust of this report is what's happening to information availability in local communities, especially with the contraction of newspapers. And in general, people who have looked at this have said, well, frankly, there's not a huge amount that the government can do to fix that. But one thing the government can do is be more transparent itself, is encourage transparency from government agencies on the local state, federal level that, in a pedestrian sense, will enable a reporter to do in a few minutes what might have taken a week to do in the past. So that's an argument for transparency. Those two different causes or needs pointed us in the direction of making this recommendation for taking the current file, putting it online. And in truth, I think a lot of times transparency as a public policy tool is overstated. It's sometimes what public policymakers do when they don't want to do whatever the hard thing is. They say we'll do some more transparency. But I really do believe that in this case, putting the public file and putting the political file online could be a transformative step. This is just taking information that is already required and putting it online. But the mere act of moving it from paper to pixels will enable people from all over the country to assess, to look at the flow of information into a campaign. It'll enable you to do comparisons within a community. It'll enable you to do it across the country. The FCC rules in some ways gather more information than the Federal Election Commission does. It includes state races, local races, and political issue advertising. So it's a real goldmine of information. So it was somewhat surprising to me that the broadcasters opposed this. Not because industry tends to oppose rules that involve more transparency. What struck me as odd, though, is who this industry was. This isn't just an industry. These are news organizations. We're talking about our news organizations that routinely demand transparency of other public officials who have taken the position that in their case, they should not have to be transparent, even when it has the potential to improve the information that is available to residents in their communities and improve the functioning of the political system. I mean, frankly, not only should the broadcasters not have been opposing this, they should have been leading the way on this. They should have been saying, we are news organizations. We should be figuring out the ways to improve transparency in the community. So that's kind of where we stand. I'm sure we'll get into the particulars of where the rules stand, but it's a really very simple, straightforward, I mean, frankly, I thought pretty noncontroversial step to take the information they are already disclosing and moving it from the filing cabinet to the internet. And yet here we are with a bit of a battle on our hands over that. Next up is Corey Wright, who is the Senior Policy Council at Free Press and has represented the Public Interest Public Airwaves Coalition on this matter and many others related to the media policy. Corey? Thanks. So not only, as Steve mentioned, our broadcasters not leading the way on this transparency initiative, they are actively dragging their feet. And just by way of historical context, the proceeding, which will hopefully end up in evote next Friday to put broadcasters public files online, is actually over a decade in the making. This proceeding was opened up in the year 2000. It stemmed for a report in the mid-90s that looked at broadcasters transition to use of the, to convert to digital broadcasting. And it was really asked the question, we're giving broadcasters extra capacity now that they've moved to digital spectrum. And what does that mean for public interest obligations going forward? And I think one of the answers to that was transparency and accessibility of information. But lo and behold, we in 2012 are apparently still having to fight the same battles over and over again. There are a slew of groups in the Public Interest Public Airwaves Coalition, Benton Foundation, United Church of Christ Camping Legal Center, groups that have for years been pushing to get basic information that I should point out broadcasters are currently required to maintain by statute in a form that the public can actually get to. We have been fighting this battle because people may be familiar with this. And I have to say, in Steve's report, the outline of the failure of the public interest bargain in terms of enforcement was disheartening. But I have to concede fairly true. A number of the groups, probably many in the audience here are watching this, are well aware of the frustrations that we've had to try to defend the public's right to be served from broadcasters who have received immense value using public property. But by and large, the FCC does not routinely monitor whether broadcasters are actually following through on rules and regulation. Instead, they put the onus largely on the public to bring to the FCC's attention when a broadcaster is violating rules, circumventing ownership restrictions, shaking down political candidates for ad fees in violation of the statute. And the problem with this method is it's very difficult for the public to help the FCC enforce the rules and regulations if they can't actually get meaningful access to this information. If you're a member of the public and you want to look at a broadcaster's public file currently, you have to take off work, drive to a station, which in some communities could be in upwards of 100 miles. And then you have to go in and talk to the station. Frequently, you will encounter fairly recalcitrant staff. Free press has conducted over 50 public file inspections. And we've heard them all, as have a number of other groups who have been confronted with things like, oh, there's no such thing as the public file. The public file is locked, and we've lost the key. Can you come back tomorrow? So typical burdens for the public are prohibitive. So we thought that the very modest proposal, which we are very gratified to see touted as a pillar of the future of media report, would to make sure that public information was actually public. And I think most people would agree that in 2012, public access means available via the internet. However, we are still struggling to make this happen. I am very hopeful that we'll have a vote next week where the FCC will do the right thing and will give the public access to a complete, unredacted online political file so that the public can see how broadcasters are using the public airwaves for partisan political purposes and also better track the groups that are seeking to influence them over the airwaves. I think it is a transparency initiative that is good for democracy and above all, above reproach. And while I'm not surprised that broadcasters are fighting against this modernization initiative, I am a little taken aback at just how profoundly they're pushing back on it. And I'm happy to answer any questions as we move forward about the particulars of what the FCC is considering going forward. Thanks. Our third panelist is Kathy Kiley, who is the managing editor at the Sunlight Foundation here in Washington. And Kathy joined Sunlight just last year after being managing editor for Politics at National Journal and is a longtime journalist. So I'm the reporter at the table and I can speak from that perspective. And I will tell you that I think that this is a particularly important initiative in a year when changes in campaign finance law mean that we will get less information about the money flowing through the political system than we have in the past. I think you're all familiar with what I'm talking about, Citizens United and the following decisions, court decisions, later court decisions and FEC decisions, which basically mean that we'll have a lot of players in the arena who aren't required to file very much at all with the Federal Election Commission, the FEC. So these public files that could be our only source of real detailed information about who's trying to influence the vote. So that makes it getting access to these files, I think, more important than ever. To Steve's point, to a couple of points he made, I think the issue of will this transparency do anything, I can tell you that despite the fact that you do have broadcast companies lobbying against this, there is, as you probably know, a pretty deep divide between the business interests of news organizations and the reporters. There are reporters who would be more than willing to make this information available given the opportunity and I think the point here is that this transparency will be used. There are reporters who want access to this information and who will publish it. But because, as Steve also pointed out, we have, because of the economics of the news business, we have smaller staffs and newspapers than ever before. There's a tremendous strain on the news media and so there are very few newsrooms right now that can afford to deploy reporters for the hours and hours and hours that it would take and believe me, this is not just a one-time visit, you have to go back multiple times to these stations. So it's a tremendous time commitment for newsrooms that are more strapped than they've ever been. And so I think, as Steve said, making this available in a way that in a modern era, it should be available. I mean, you know, let me put my reporters hat on, this doesn't pass the smell test. If you look at the filings, they're clearly printouts of computer-generated records. So how hard can this be to put it online? And the fact that people aren't willing to do that, again, as a reporter, that makes my antenna go up and say, what are we trying to hide here? So we are part, along with Free Press, of a coalition. We're trying to develop a group of people to do what I would call a pro-AM, where we're trying to use some interested public volunteers to be the legs to help us go out and cover what news organizations can't. We're hoping news organizations will be involved and to try to essentially prove that this can be done. It's kind of a DIY effort to liberate the files and we're hoping that we'll have some success. So I'd be happy to answer more questions later. All right, thanks, Kathy. Next is Harold Feld, who is the legal director at Public Knowledge, which is almost just down the street here in DC. And Harold also focused quite a bit more, even, when he was at the Media Access Project for a decade on media policy issues. Harold? The fact that we are even having this debate just outrages me no end. In part, because the level of hypocrisy on the part of the broadcasters in this area is just staggering. The reason I say that is not just because they got their licenses for free. The usual response is, yeah, that was like 100 years ago and we've invested so much money on our station, so who cares? But in addition to that, these guys routinely get privileges in law, special treatment from legislators and rule makers because we're the special public trustees who serve your local community and when hurricanes come, we're there and we do things for orphans. And excuse me, you're either cold-blooded capitalists who don't have any obligations to the public so sucks to be us, or you are public trustees holding the spectrum for the public good and we get stuff back for it. Let me take one simple example. Retransmission consent. We didn't used to have this. Retransmission consent for those who are unaware of it is a special rule that was put in place solely for the benefit of broadcasters. It used to be until 1976 that the rule was if you were broadcasting, you obviously intended everybody to get your signal, so we will allow anybody with an antenna to capture it. That includes what were at those time called community antenna television, or as we now know them today, cable systems, sticking antennas on hilltops in other areas that were not getting very good reception so they could capture all those over-the-air channels and then resell that to people who couldn't otherwise receive the free TV. And that was fine. Then in 1976, we amended the law to give a payment to the copyright holders, the people who actually were making the content. Okay, fine. Content guys ought to be reimbursed. That's how our copyright system works. It was a mechanical license so it didn't become too complicated. That was fine. But the broadcasters who are still being paid through this advertising model and this notion of the public interest for the use of this very valuable spectrum were understandably not given a cut of that pie because, again, they're broadcasting. That's the whole idea. That's their business. The way they were paid back was every cable subscriber still saw those ads the same way that any over-the-air subscriber saw those ads. But then in 1992, because we were worried that cable operators were dropping local channels and local channels would vanish and we would just be left with this national broadcast type network programming and all of this local trustee, local public interest service, local this, local that was gonna die. We set up this retrans must-carry idea. If the broadcaster wants to be carried, even if the cable operator doesn't wanna carry it, they're entitled to tell the cable operator, tough, I'm special, carry me. And on the other hand, if the programming is actually valuable, the broadcaster could say, no, I've decided that I'm special but I'm also valuable so I want you to pay me for the privilege of carrying me. Broadcasters now make millions of dollars off of this. And every time we come up for one of these debates where there's a contract negotiation and they're trying to deal with the retrans, the broadcasters turn around and say, well, hell no, FCC don't get involved. Don't worry about the fact that millions of people are gonna be deprived of the free programming that is supposedly why we get these licenses for free. You know, all market, you know, it's wonderful. You know, cause we're making the money here. But when it came to wanting to get their digital streams, their additional new streams that they got for free when we did the digital transition on, then it was make cable carriers because we're special and local. So, you know, I get that private companies are all about this dichotomy and using it the way they can. But it's particularly revolting in this context. The effort to put these public files online is so trivial that it is astonishing that they haven't done so already. The fact that these broadcasters spend more time actively trying to discourage the public when people show up from finding the public file, then it would take, if they just complied with the goddamn rules, is a clear indicator that what we are dealing with is this ridiculous sense of entitlement and a sort of spitting on the public while simultaneously claiming the mantle of being public trustees who are special. And again, I've just talked about retrans, but I could go through the code and find a lot of other examples of where these guys play the we're trustees, we're local, we're special, protect us, do special stuff for us card. So here's my solution, by the way. I have a proposal, I think Adam, I'm gonna pass through the X, may actually like this proposal. We started doing auctions for applications for commercial broadcast stations starting about 1997, 1998, when more than one person wanted that broadcast license. Instead of doing license renewals, like we do now, based on some public interest obligation, let's instead go the other way and say, you're right, we're gonna junk this whole public interest thing. From now on, every eight years, we're gonna open up for bids for people who wanna do commercial broadcasting. And whoever bids the most money and pays that back to the public as the return on the public spectrum, you will get this license for the next eight years. It's a lease, we'll do another auction again in another eight years, but if this is the return on investment now for spectrum, and again, I'm gonna exempt non-commercial from my proposal because there's clearly value in non-commercial, and the non-commercial folks are providing different perspectives and different ideas just for commercial. And say, if this is money is all you understand, and money is what you think this is all about, then fine, you wanna use the public asset then pay like the wireless companies pay. Not gonna drive you out of broadcasting, we'll auction it as an eight year lease on a broadcast license. But at least give us something rather than telling us that you're special public trustees and then not even bothering to put the information that you owe the public online. And then you could use the money to hire reporters to go look at the public file. All right, thanks Harold. And then finally we have Adam Thierre who is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, which is part of George Mason University. And Adam has been in these trenches for many, many years previously served as President of the Progress and Freedom Foundation and Director of Telecom Studies at Cato, among other things, Adam. Thank you, Michael. And it's a privilege to be here today. I appreciate the invite to be here today. I'll say just a word about the narrow issue we're debating here today about the public file and then something broader about public interest obligations going forward. On the narrow issue, I'm afraid I'm gonna disappoint if you were expecting me to put up much of a fight. It's really hard to make a case against transparency in almost any context, especially as someone who was trained as a journalist 25 years ago. And in this context, I think the broadcasters have a bit of a silly argument, the cost of digitizing and making things more transparent, putting them online are almost certainly lower than the broadcasters suggest. I think the best argument they could make would be basically we should affix these sorts of transparency mandates to campaigns and candidates through FEC regulation as opposed to FCC regulation. I think I'd be more in tune with them on that, but generally speaking, they don't have a very good case here, I don't think. But on the broader question of public interest obligations going forward, including things like public file and transparency mandates, I think there's a much more interesting debate to be had here, which is that, does this system scale? Does it have legs going forward? What is the future of public interest regulation? Because in a world where over the air, television and radio broadcasting are a diminishing portion of our media diet on a daily basis, and I think it's under 10% now for television. At what point does this all become sort of a meaningless game? Because it obviously doesn't apply to all the new guys in town, not just the sort of more direct competitors of broadcasting, but the indirect ones, including social media sites and services and the Googles and Facebooks and smartphone platforms and app developers of the world. Politicians and campaigns, they advertise in a lot of other places too, and increasingly that money is fungible and moving to other places in this world. I think it's good that we encourage transparency across the board. Whether we can mandate it is another question, and I certainly don't think we have the authority under current law to obviously scale these regulations up to cover the entire modern information ecosystem. I should also just point out, something that Michael mentioned at the beginning, there's a discussion going on right now about incentive auctions and legislation and everything else, and we're moving towards a world where a lot of broadcasters might get out of this game entirely, and then we have really almost no leverage to impose these sorts of public interest obligations, even when they're ones I might agree with, like transparency requirements. And then finally, even more broadly, there's an ongoing definitional dispute about what is the public interest, and there's almost a fairy tale-like quality to these debates sometimes. It reminds me of debates I had in philosophy classes in college about what is beauty? What is art? What is the public interest? They're always interesting debates. Sometimes I'll even find myself agreeing with proponents of law to make it so, but I think at the end of the day, these debates are really intractable, and the bigger problem I have is the practical one, what it means in practice, because I think Harold was exactly right when he talked about the fact that the broadcasters have taken advantage of this regime and the whole idea of public trustee to obtain all sorts of privileges and special treatment. And he just scratched the surface with things like must-carry and retrans. I mean, how about that DTV Spectrum giveaway? I mean, that was something that was sort of like a high-tech teapot dome scandal of our times, and yet they got that. How about the ideas of like tuner mandates and things that we hear them throw out even today? I mean, there's a long, long history here as Harold suggested, but I would suggest there's a direct linkage from all these scandals and all that special treatment to their public interest obligations, because at the end of the day, there's a long and unfortunate history of regulatory capture in a number of sectors, and the FCC has not been immune from it. I'll just read you one quote from a recent history that I think was quite good on this, which says, again and again in the history as I've recounted, the state has shown itself an inferior arbiter of what is good for information industries. The federal government's role in radio and television, for instance, was nothing short of a disgrace. Government's tendency to protect large market players amounts to illegitimate complicity, particularly its sense of obligation to protect big industries, irrespective of their having become uncompetitive. That was the crazy conservative Tim Wu, except Tim, of course, is not a crazy conservative. Tim is very much progressive left, and he understands quite rightly, and is documented, that regulatory capture has become an intractable problem within communications and media markets. And so we're gonna have a discussion about public interest obligations. We have to be mature enough to acknowledge that any system that is big enough and important enough to be captured potentially will be. And so I would argue that the best way going forward to think about and to attain certain public interest goals is to think about going the public expenditure route. If we have concerns about children's television, about localism, about news, it's almost always better to devote general treasury revenue funds to some sort of program to deal with those than to ask an intermediary to do it for us through some sort of an amorphous public interest quid pro quo sort of regulatory scheme. And I think it was Henry Geller's work that convinced me of this more than anybody else's, and he's favored for a long, long time the idea of maybe some sort of a spectrum tax or a license fee that would go to fund that other types of public interest programming or things that we currently have obligations for. Now you could make a pretty good argument from the broadcast perspective that if you do that today, you're penalizing them relative to all their competitors. Even if you believe that there is some sort of an obligation there under public interest regulation. And I think they're gonna have a pretty good argument because of course they're already in some trouble in some other ways relative to some of these new competitors. We could again have an argument about that. But at the end of the day, you could still just shift the debate to say, well just use general treasury funds however we might get through. And that's the way we go about public interest obligations and regulation. Of course that doesn't handle everything that doesn't help us on transparency, right? You still might want transparency in other ways. But again I just go back to my scale point which is how do you get there in a world where increasingly mass media and all media is increasingly out of the regulatory bucket and in a very different one than under the 34 Act and the public interest regime. Thank you. All right, thanks Adam. Well let me I guess start by seeing if any of you have any comment for each other or any reaction to anything you've heard now that these different perspectives are out there just to give you a chance if anybody wants to comment on anything that was said. I'll accept as a friendly amendment to my option proposal that the money from that would be dedicated to go to the non-commercial broadcasters in order to provide them with money to do the public interest programming. Yeah and there's been proposals along those lines in the past such as digital promise. So actually to come back around to and ask for some additional comment on what Adam raised about regulatory capture. I mean are the public interest obligations still viable or are they just encouraging in a sense this whole web of subsidies for broadcasting which also isn't over the air all that much anymore. It is mostly thanks to the must carry over cable requirements. It's mostly over cable satellite telcos to the extent that services like Fios are like cable. And I know that I gotta mention Henry Gellar who is here actually former general counsel at the FCC and has had a proposal for years that partly because of that the difficulty politically because the broadcasters are so politically powerful because of that difficulty that we should think about monetizing the public interest obligations and spending the money directly for children's programming or whatever it is that we are public broadcasting the things that we really value. So I don't know if there's any views on this idea of a direct linkage that's in sort of a negative externality of public interest obligations. Corey. I'd be happy to take that and I'll probably reveal myself to be something of maybe the naive dreamer among the crew here because I do still very much believe in broadcasting. I have spoken to broadcasters who take very seriously their obligation to the public. I also have tangoed with a number of broadcasters who use the public interest standard as a way to leverage lots of regulatory goodies and otherwise pay lip service to many of the things that I think local communities hold dear. Some things I would quibble with is that while it is true that we have a lot of the American people receiving broadcasting via a cable subscription that does not change the fact that those broadcasters are still occupying that public space and spectrum and that that property is still to the community licensed to the community and that obligation doesn't go away because of that. The other thing that I think I would quibble with is that by and large broadcasters are still the mainstay of people who provide local news and information and the internet and cable is not really providing a repository function. The FCC actually just released a study that looked at web native news sources and determined that if you're looking for local news on the internet, the people that you will find there are the same people that occupy the real world. So you have newspapers and television stations and radios basically leveraging their incumbency and also brand recognition and some of their news gathering and then occupying the exact same space on the web. If broadcasting goes away, it is very much not clear that we will have another service come in and replace that function. So to the extent that some of the legacy value of broadcasters' public interest obligations which is a bargain that was elegant in its conception and I fear has atrophied a lot over the past few decades is still, I think alive and kicking for those of us in the public interest community, I think that there's some frustration that the government hasn't been more on the public side in terms of upholding that bargain. Strangely, I want to echo what Corey says in praise of broadcasters since they're not here at the table, I want to echo the point that both that there are a lot of broadcasters that take very seriously their service to the community and that in many communities, local TV news has the best business model for providing local news and is doing so to a very broad range of people when you think about types of media, even though people from print-backed background, which I came from routinely mock local TV news as being inferior, the fact is that local TV news performs a small d-democratic function that many other media do not in providing news for a kind of breathtakingly broad range of people. Now on the public interest, what could be done about the public interest obligation? I really agree with what Adam and some of you, Harold, has said that if you look at the way the bargain used to work, some people when we were doing this report said, well, yeah, it's been the subject of regulatory capture in the past, but the solution to that is to stop doing that, just buck up and start actually enforcing the thing, we did it at one point, we can do it again, and that it's not locked into the laws of the universe that the FCC must be captured by its industry. So we looked at that and I was, frankly, started off sort of sympathetic to that impulse, but what we concluded, and this was just our view, was that it's not just the question of regulatory capture, there's also the matter of the Constitution and the First Amendment, and that there are, if you try to get specific enough to have real meaty rules for program guidelines, you're gonna run up against the First Amendment. If you say, okay, no, don't wanna get too specific, we'll just have broad goals, then they become meaningless and unenforceable. That's a real dilemma that is hard to solve. I'll give you a specific example. Some people at the time we were doing this said, well, why don't you have the broadcasters as a provision of licensing have to do a certain percentage of hours, a certain number of hours of news. Don't have to say whether it's good news or quality or anything like that, just hours, count hours, that's statistical, doesn't involve an infringement on First Amendment. Well, the fact is for the last five years, local TV news has increased the number of hours it produces by about 30, 35%. There's a boom in the number of hours of local news. That's not the problem. And if you were to try to set up a regulatory regimen based on hours, you would be tapping into the wrong thing, the wrong measure. So that's just an example of why I think it's hard to do it in the old way. So the second point I wanted to make about that, which I think was underlying what Adam and Harold have said, is that the broadcaster position is not a free market position. They are not taking the view that we should have a free market approach to broadcasting. A free market approach would be a spectrum fee or it might be auctions or something like that that would have a sort of market mechanism. We'd say, okay, forget it. We're not gonna have all these rules about what public interest means. We're gonna go to a market mechanism, pay cold hard cash and go on with your business. That's not what they're advocating for. They would not support Harold's proposal. They would probably not support Adam's proposal. They prefer the situation where we pretend to have a meaningful public interest obligation but don't actually have an enforceable one. So I think the first step is to be honest about that and say the old public interest obligation system doesn't really work. One option is to go to a more market-oriented system. Let's have an honest conversation about it but let's not pretend that what we have now is a free market. What we have now is a kind of soft corporate welfare system that is not effective at advancing a public interest obligation nor is it an effective market-oriented solution. I just wanna add a point slightly in the FCC's defense which is the regulatory capture is not just the FCC. It is also Congress. It is pretty much everybody who needs to be involved with things like running for office or who doesn't want to be the source of a hard-hitting investigative news show about how they're trying to take free TV away from you or whatever it is. The capture of these things and how they play out in various events is sort of illustrated by the way that the conservative media made the fairness doctrine which no one in the world was thinking of bringing back into this great boogeyman for folks. So as part of the realism question of how you would enforce this, there is a, it's not just well, if we could just get the right FCC chairman and the right FCC commissioners or even the right FCC staff then everything would be okay because there's a universe of folks and an ability to influence here that people need to be cognizant about that I agree with Steve and that goes beyond what Steve was saying which seems to be then looking kind of here but also in other places where we have had ideas of the public interest and what that means not just in other areas of communications media for example in cable what we did was to establish PEG and say okay, you know, if we'll instead of having the cable operators who weren't programmers at the time to do it let's take some of the capacity and make it available for these other civic uses and that will be the public interest obligation that you guys have. In wireless communications, you know, we focused on universal service and build out requirements and said, you know, the way in which you're holding a license in the public interest and convenience if you are Verizon wireless is that when you get a license to cover an area that includes a profitable city and a less profitable rural area around it you're supposed to build out to that entire area and we do that in the same way that we, you know, traditionally did that with wire line phones so we've had different ideas of what could serve the public interest. It seems to me that if we are going to stay with a public interest model then we need to move to things that are not so easily manipulated which is to say either very straightforward things like this political advertising and other advertising, you know, it's not hard to ask, you know, to get people to fill out the form, ask the questions, put it online, make that information available or things that are very straightforward and self executing like peg or other areas where you say, look, you know, you must set aside this much time for, you know, people to come in and be able to lease time on your digital streams or whatever it is that we wanted to do to at least make more capacity available for some of these things locally or, you know, again, the final thing is as people brought up, let's just buckle down and say there's an important social value and we pay for it, you know, we pay for education, we pay for rural service, for broadband, well, not yet for broadband, but for, we pay for, you know, through a subsidy for broadband to schools and libraries, there are a lot of things that we say that's important to us as a society, let's fund it and get it done properly and, you know, I just think that that makes more sense in a lot of ways than, you know, kind of hoping that we will somehow get the right people in at the FCC to enforce the rules as they were. Can't help but help myself, but to point out one irony in what Harold was saying about perhaps as a part of a public interest obligation to provide capacity to the public, yeah, you can most readily think of that in terms of broadcasting capacity, as many cable operators do with local peg, you know, as a obligation to their, you know, to get rights of way and so on, but an irony with the broadcasters is that actually, they fiercely opposed for years the one form of access that was completely cost free to them, which is access to all the vacant TV channels that were set aside many years ago as guard bands, right? So this is the TV white space, so there are 49 still, even after the DTV transition in the last round of auctions, there are 49 television channels set aside for terrestrial broadcasting, that's the allocation, and since there's only an average of less than eight stations, full power stations licensed per market, the majority of that space of those channels are actually vacant, and now, at least technically speaking, because we're in the implementation phase, are open for unlicensed use, this is what Chairman Genakowski's called super Wi-Fi, and yet the broadcasters not only fiercely opposed that for years and years, fiercely opposed public access to the vacant TV channels they weren't even using, thinking that that was also their property, but they continue to oppose it, and as a result we have incredibly restrictive conditions on how you can use that for Wi-Fi type operations. So I just thought I'd point that out because there are a lot of dots to connect. I wanted to get back, I guess, to the next question. To Steve mentioned that Harold said it's good if you can get something that's concrete and quantifiable, but Steve mentioned that he didn't think a public interest regime based on a number of hours of programming was very viable, but I should point out and Corey could perhaps fill in more to this, but the New America is also part of the Public Interest Public Airwaves Coalition and for years, as Corey mentioned, this proceeding has been going on for 10 years, and for many of those 10 years, we all have been advocating for a parallel to the children's educational programming requirement, the three hours per week, which stations a long time ago, studies showed were sometimes fulfilling with the Flintstones and other... It teaches history. Pardon? Flintstones teaches history. Flintstones teaches history, but prehistoric days, but putting that aside, and I think they've gotten better on that, what we advocated was a parallel requirement for news and public affairs, because whether or not, as Steve mentioned, many stations have increased the number of news hours in the past couple years. There are also many stations that have no news at all or only replay news from other places, so having a three hour per week requirement for news and public affairs and or a requirement to have additional coverage of local elections and candidates during the six weeks prior to an election was something that we thought, in fact, was both reasonable and quantifiable, so I guess I just throw it back again to you all about whether, you know, considering that for those broadcasters that do remain on the air, we are going to have some sort of this continuing public interest regime for DTV, should we be adding on a news and public affairs requirement as well, and if it's not quantified in hours, is there some other way to do it? Well, I guess I'll start by saying why we didn't recommend that. Part of it was what I said before, that sort of defining what news and public affairs is that encouraging more hours doesn't necessarily help the world, and in fact, in an economic sense, if you have a community where four channels or three channels are doing local news and three channels aren't, and two of the channels are getting by and have a real news organization, forcing channels four, five, and six to do what would probably be a crappy local newscast is not gonna help the community that much, and it might actually undercut the economic viability of stations one, two, and three. So I have no problem with the compulsion part of it, but I don't think it actually helps the information needs of a community. Now, I would make a little bit of a distinction though. One thing that I think would be worth considering is not so much a mandate about news, but an end date about local. I think it is fair to say that if you are getting a broadcast signal with the main purpose of being serving your community, that you ought to be doing some programming that is about the community, at least some. And there are stations now that do zero programming about the community and have that license, and I think that's a conversation about whether or not there ought to be some minimum requirement of programming about the community. Doesn't have to necessarily even be news. It can be covering the high school, you know, the high school sports team. If you're gonna have that kind of a regimen. I still, at the end of the day, tend to think that the better way to go is more in the direction of a spectrum fee, where you're essentially paying your public interest obligation in cold hard cash, and we figure out what to do with it. Let me raise three uncomfortable facts related to something that people don't often discuss in this debate, which is demand, public demand for a lot of the content we're talking about. Because I think there's always a lot of wishful thinking in these debates about exactly how much of these local public affairs and news programming content that we think the public demands and how much they actually do. It's not to say that this content and programming is not important. It is absolutely important. But here's some realities about our new world we live in. First, in a crowded information environment, the competition for your eyes and ears is intense, to say the least. There's a lot of other places you can attract your attention, and the Nobel Prize winning economist Herbert Simon pointed this out many years ago when he talked about the competition that information abundance creates for your attention and how it creates a scarcity of attention as a result. And we see that in our modern world, this information cacophony around us, and we shouldn't be surprised when people choose other things, including endless reality television shows and other garbage that some of us don't like and would prefer they watch something else, but they indeed have these choices. Second of all, when it comes to news and public affairs programming, there is still a major appetite for it, but it's not always local and character. After all, look at the enormous success of C-SPAN. And the fact is over the last 30 years, this has been one of the most important changes in how the public consumes news and information is that there's been a bit of a substitution effect where they've shifted a lot of their attention to the federal level that wasn't there before, oftentimes because they just didn't have access to that information. But C-SPAN has provided such a wonderful public service to Americans that they've increasingly opted to view that as opposed to other types of news and informational programming. When Steve first started his project at the FCC, we talked about this and he says, yeah, that's great, the C-SPAN model is awesome. How do we get a bunch of C-SPANs at the state and local level? And so this raises my third uncomfortable observation about this debate, which is that it is entirely possible that all of this local affairs programming that we've been expecting the local broadcasters to do for us potentially crowds out some of the market for others to come in and do it. Now we'd like to imagine that there's sort of an infinite supply out there that could be had or people that are willing to fill these needs, but there's not, and there's not infinite resources. And increasingly we lean on broadcasters so heavily to do it for us, maybe somebody else would be a C-SPAN of my hometown of Crown Point, Indiana or wherever else it might be in this world. But instead a lot of us say, well, the broadcasters are the only game in town and we would just sort of leave it at that. Well, I'm not necessarily willing to leave it at that. Maybe there are other opportunities and we might find this out anyway. I mean, if the broadcasters end up taking the check in incentive auction world and cashing out, we're gonna find out pretty quickly because they won't be there to do that anymore. They might sell those local operations and maybe interesting things will happen. I don't know. A couple of responses to Adam because these economic arguments I always find are very interesting. In part because there are a lot of ways to kind of slice the pie and slice the value about demand, what drives it, what moves it. A couple of, and as you know, we've had these arguments a lot over the years. So I sort of toss out in response other things to consider which is one on the demand and value question which is demand for news reporting particularly in an age when things are retrievable online is actually very interesting and durable. There may be kind of low demanded six o'clock when the six o'clock news is on but it turns out that particularly now as I say, when we have new and different ways in which this information can be retrieved and yes, monetized, we really don't know what the demand is. Corey was indicating earlier people online look to local news sources. If we are seeing lots of people very interested in particular things following local news online but that local news ratings are not that great. What does that tell us about value? What does it tell us that there's a value that may be very interesting that there may be long tail low value coming in for a lot of these things for years which leads to a sort of second issue if we accept that this is a societal good which again may mean that it's not a commercial model but some other kind of model that we want to have. We have the issue of it's not the, it's only there when you need it if it's around all of the other times. So we have seen that there are events that suddenly trigger lots and lots of interest in the news like when 9-11 occurred, when the financial meltdown occurred and then suddenly everyone was like where is my local news? Where is my national news? Where is my in depth coverage? Why isn't anybody telling us about this? And then as is the case where there's a lot of distraction people go on with their lives and but if we are gonna have an infrastructure there when we need it we have to figure out some way to support it during the times when it's not necessarily available. Finally, there is this a cause and effect problem. Is it that the public doesn't want local news or is it that the local news is not giving the public what they want? And I've been fascinated for many, many years I've tracked the Pew survey on the news, the project for excellence in journalism which has done many, many studies about this and the decline in news viewing is actually a lagging indicator behind what Pew has characterized as hard news. That is to say the issue was and to some degree was at some point in the mid and late 90s people decided the people who were making the news which were relatively small group at that point because of the nature of ownership decided that people didn't want hard news and what they wanted was softer, soapy or entertainmenty stuff and that's what they started to produce and then as demand dropped instead of responding in a rational mark I always say, whoa, we guessed wrong about the product that they want we should go to some hard news and see if we get people back. They said, no, it's just not soft enough yet. So they softened it, stupefied it some more and more people kept drifting off and the conclusion that was drawn from the people who were producing the good was well I guess there's no demand but a rational response could also have been, well no, it looked like people were starting to go to other sources of news when those became available there was actually demand for hard news you just were not meeting it. Can I just enter too as a veteran of 30 years in newsrooms? I would say a couple things. One, regarding the C-SPAN model C-SPAN describes itself as cable's gift to the American people. So in a sense it is the industry's effort to meet its public service requirement so it fits into the model I think of the industry having access to the public and then returning something back. The second thing I would say is that in terms of the public's appetite for news my perception is it's greater than ever we have more people consuming news at more hours of the day for more resources than ever the pressures on the newsroom have nothing to do with the public appetite for news it has to do with economic and technological disruptions that have undermined the economic model for news but and that is completely separate from what people want. The only thing I would add just a second to Harold I think part of the problem we're seeing in decline in local news is a lack of connection to broadcasters and their communities and in part of that is an information deficit between broadcasters and their communities. Regardless of what people think about previous SEC policies with ascertainment that happened in the 70s and were this rated in the 80s there was at one point an obligation on broadcasters to talk to people in the community and figure out what they want. That has been since reduced to a issues programs list in the public file that is free form would be a charitable way I think of describing it but to it and I always any opportunity I can to highlight this from the future of media report one broadcasters issue programs list listed as community responsive programming sponsoring in America's next top model audition in concert with Sonny's hair and wigs and this was this broadcasters assessment of the local information need of that community and one of the reasons that I think we've supported the SEC future of information reports efforts to make this information is more transparent is that if I was a member of that community assuming that I was not a six foot leggy supermodel I might actually quibble with whether or not an America's next top model audition was serving my needs as a member of that community I might for example prefer to see coverage of a local election or uncovering corruption in city hall and I think having communities more in tune to what broadcasters think they're doing to serve the public even outside FCC enforcement could actually help to build a bridge and better communication skills so a member of the community can say to your broadcaster I'm not a leggy supermodel I'd like some election coverage, thank you. So. One very quick thing even though it's I know we're supposed to be throwing rocks at broadcasters here but I'd like to throw a rock at the cable guys too. When as Adam was saying there has been often a response from the cable industry when faced with some sort of regulatory proposal to say no actually the right way to do this is what we did with C-SPAN we did a voluntary effort created this what became a great national institution that was voluntary but really served a public purpose and so the FCC report said great we agreed do it again we really need this to be done on the state level every state should have a state C-SPAN right now 23 states have states only four of them are following the models of the cable of C-SPAN which is to say that they get money from subscriber fees. Very disappointing to me that after the report came out the cable industry has not taken up that mantle and is not trying to create state spends in every state I wish they would as I think it's a very simple thing that they could do to help really improve the information availability in communities. All right well actually following up a bit on that whether it's cable or the broadcasters who are the regulated or more regulated in this sense I think there's been an acknowledgement right that a state C-SPAN or local content production or even additional local news gathering costs money so there'll be this economic pushback and in fact even on the making the public putting the public file online there's an economic pushback so another part of the flow back from Las Vegas is oh this is terribly burdensome we're gonna have to hire more staff to put this online and so I wanted to come back a second because I think it's informative to what Harold brought up about retransmission consent revenue so this is the more popular televisions the more watched television stations particularly the network affiliates can all broadcasters have must carry so cable has the burden to put them on the air but they can come back and say well no actually we're gonna black you out unless you pay us and so the network affiliates in particular take advantage of it and it was interesting we put out the paper on the table there by Phil Napoli at Fordham University a very recent paper that he presented in DC and I was actually surprised at the steep uphill line on the one hand the retransmission consent revenue that broadcasters are receiving so it's increased from just over $200 million in 2006 to an estimated 1.3 to 1.4 million last year so that's like a six-fold increase in retransmission consent revenue whereas at the same time at least the studies Phil was looking at indicated that local news as a percentage of broadcast time had declined from 12% to 7% and public affairs was flat at less than 1% of programming time so I guess I just ask doesn't that indicate that there is revenue available? I mean even if you put aside even if you chalk up to ancient history the giving away of the spectrum isn't there also still resources coming in to local broadcasting that could easily absorb these burdens? Can I just answer that by pointing out something that you said which is you basically to paraphrase you you said the message coming out of Las Vegas, Las Vegas was that this is going to be too expensive we can't afford it. I mean it just doesn't pass the smell test this is an industry that is the poor mouthing doesn't do it for me and coming from my again the newsroom sensibility it doesn't cut it. Well I will also point out that in most industries the internet actually makes things more efficient and less expensive if the broadcasters were able to figure out a way to use the internet to become less efficient and more costly that would be a real achievement of sorts but I don't think it's really what they should be pushing for. So I hold a brief of the broadcasters on retrends you can read one of my weekly Forbes columns was entitled Toward a True Free Market in Video Programming and it was in favor of reform legislation that basically would do away with retrends and consent regime and a lot of the other types of special favors that broadcasters have had including Muscarry that being said let me just say this that one of the reasons these retrends revenues are going up is because obviously the cost of content is going up and you can't divorce from this conversation a discussion about sports programming and other types of entertainment content. There's just no doubt about it these are the drivers of what's happening here so it's not like the broadcasters take all this in and just sit on a pile of cash there are a lot of other drivers to this it's a very complicated thing the sports part of it in particular I don't, it's an intractable problem it may end up being as I've talked to others about that we end up having a carve out a special regulatory regime in this country just to deal with the sports programming problem that pervades this issue right now because it's such a driver of the cost. Cash the broadcasters are sitting on which is the $3.2 billion in political advertising revenues that are slated to come in this year and we'll only go upwards from here I think for those of us who've been working on the political file transparency aspect what has been so incredibly frustrating about the claims that putting information that they are already required by statute to disclose to the public would be burdensome compounded with the hand over fist amounts of money that they will be pulling in is a real kind of offense I think to sensibilities and their duties. Steve is exactly right the broadcasters really cannot continue to make the argument with a straight face that shifting to an online file would be more burdensome because currently what they have to do is print out the electronic communication that they use to sell their advertising time walk it down to a room and put it in a file with a bunch of other paper and then when somebody wants to look at that file there's some member of the broadcast staff that has to babysit them and make sure they don't steal anything. So I cannot fathom how you can make the argument that somehow taking that electronic communication and uploading it and then not having to babysit someone particularly during the very, very busy election cycle when you have people from campaigns looking at this is a less efficient use of time for the broadcaster and to Kathy's point when you're trying to hide something it makes people's radar go up and say well what is it that you're trying to conceal? And as I said before hopefully the FCC will do the right thing the public has a right to see this information and that right to public information should mean actual accessibility not the sort of hypothetical accessibility that we currently have right now. I just wanna say to former commissioner Tristani actually has been indicating that she had something to say there and I personally think that we might wanna open this up to the audience a little bit. Yeah, we're just about to do that. So wanna open it to the audience and former commissioner Tristani who I think sounds like she has a point on relevant to right now. For those who don't know me I'm a former FCC commissioner Gloria Tristani I served from 1997 to 2001 and I wanted to give a little bit of historical perspective or add to some of what our wonderful panelists have been saying. I voted on the disclosure item that's currently under discussion in 2000. It actually was a series of three proceedings and one of the things, the reasons I voted in favor of opening up some discussion on what the broadcasters ought to be doing was that they were about to get a great gift with the digital transition and the idea is you're getting this great gift what are you gonna give to the public in addition to that? Right now they're not giving anything. After I left the FCC in 2001, in 2003 I went to work for the United Church of Christ and I was part of the Public Interest Public Airwaves Coalition which continued to work on these issues for greater disclosure, greater transparency and for actually for what's been called here loosely the three hour proposal of what we called news and local information. And it wasn't a hard three hours of news we thought it was very flexible so that it wouldn't be burdensome. You could do local programming you could do electoral programming but we just wanted some kind of accountability and also some way for the public to know what the broadcasters were actually doing. So fast forward, 12 years later we're still discussing this. And although I'm an optimist and an idealist I think I have to agree that the system seems to be broken because we're not getting much back or the public isn't from the broadcasters although there are some very good broadcasters. So I think it's interesting to talk about auctions let's get back and use that money in some other ways but there are also some realities is that right now funding anything new is almost impossible in the political. So I'm very worried of saying let's have an auction get all this money put into the treasury and expect that we're gonna be able to see to the treasury fund public broadcasting so I'm worried about that. I'm also worried that whatever transition we may go to or new models may take time. So what I wanna ask the panelists is should we give up for the moment? This is a system that we have right now. So what do we do now and in the transition to some other model which may take three, five, 10 years what do we do to get enhanced value for the public? And one last thing I just it's the historical perspective but we haven't talked about some other public interest obligations that broadcasters and others have been meeting just to give a little perspective that there are things that government has required that are good closed captioning. It's not only good for the communities with disabilities it's good for people my age who now don't hear as well. Video description although that was struck down by the courts but some broadcasters are doing that. Equal employment opportunity rules that yes were struck down by the courts about nine years ago but that for 30 years enhanced and made the newsrooms and broadcasting rooms look very different. So I'm just talking about there has been value that's out there that's been government required so I guess I'm pleading to let's not give up and at least let's not give up while we have a system that requires that we do have something that's meaningful for the public and the panelists wanna say anything I'd like to comment here and give up or not. I would just say that in terms of this election year the thing that you could ask them to do is disclose these files and disclose them online because as I said earlier this is a year when we are being deprived of information and other spheres so if we could get this information now it's relevant it's important to voters to know they have a right to know who's trying to influence their vote so these things are in computers somewhere let's put them online. We'll be happy to sort the data out for you. I would add the emergency alert system is one of the things that it's yes it's true that it's not always hopeless there are but one of the things I would say is we should look at what these things have in common the ones that have worked in you know in addition to looking at what hasn't worked and figuring out like where it went wrong but also the things that we do have that do work like the emergency alert system like closed captioning and part of it is that these things are fairly straightforward and mechanical to do. They don't require a lot of the which was one of the things that I mentioned when I said if I were restructuring this I'd say you'd want them to be as concrete and as without discretion by anybody as possible which is one of my big problems with as people have described trying to do this hours of news or categories of this or categories of that things like ownership limitations I think are so that we have different owners and different you know and greater diversity of voices in the system a you know I think that or things that are somewhat more straightforward to be done like set-asides on digital systems the payment system I agree with you that it's hard to if you have an auction you know pretty much everything's going into the treasury and you know we could have done it with the DTV ancillary 5% which I don't know that anybody counts for I've always wondered where the hell that money goes if it actually gets collected who collects it and where the hell that money goes but we could divert that so that it's an automatic payment in the way that you know again we did with peg I do feel that when we talk about you know the why doesn't don't we have state C spans that you know if there were anybody here for alliance community media they'd say we so do it's the peg system we can argue whether that really is C span equivalent but it is important and it provides local programming and local perspective and you know one of the reasons it can do that is in some communities they get funding as part of the franchise fee and you know I don't think that while I agree you know on the don't give up hope entirely I do think that one of the ways to do it is set up an automatic funding stream try to find a way to do it painlessly we tried to do it with public broadcasting and it didn't happen it hasn't happened yet but if we were gonna look for actual programming I have to say that finding some way to pay for it and make it happen on a regular basis to me just seems the most likely to get us where we need to go. One concrete additional thing that we proposed in the information needs report that I would love to see the FCC do relates to what's been called pay for play and that is when a local TV news show essentially has an advertorial content that is really structured and led by an advertiser without adequately disclosing it. There already are rules sponsorship identification rules that require for that to be disclosed but it happens very quickly and fleetingly at the end of the broadcast so we suggested let's put that on the internet too and that could be a significant change because then you could essentially have a permanent record created of which stations are doing pay for play and which aren't and perhaps that would have the effect of putting pressure on the stations that are doing that to do it last. Let's get another question right here in front. Oh, there's a microphone. I'm Mitzi Werth, I'm with the Naval Postgraduate School. I guess I'm a little lost in this conversation because I don't understand the dollars. I mean you just, the broadcasters say it would cost too much. What are they saying it would cost versus what you're trying to say it's an inconsequential cost. It would just be nice to understand that because that seems to me would carry more of the story if one understood how silly their argument is. So broadcasters are estimating that on the individual station level this could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and the industry wide it would be millions. What are they based that on? I don't know. Why don't you ask? We have. Why don't they say it? Yes. It's baloney. So there are some, so the thing that we have been trying to put across here is that putting the public file on is essentially a replacement value. We are not asking broadcasters to maintain an additional online public file. We're asking that they replace their current paper file duties with one that comports I think with the values that we all hold in the 21st century that it be online, easily accessible. So your question is a really good one because I don't think broadcasters have a very good answer for it. So what's their other explanation as to why they don't wanna do it? They don't want to reveal what they're charging people for political advertisements. Okay. And I would just say that if you want to see That's the important piece to understand. The counter of that argument you can look on our website, SunlightFoundation.com and follow the unlimited money. We are counting it up. Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. All of the independent expenditures and I think it was up to about 78 million the last time. So I think they can cover it. Whatever the cost. Let's do, I think we have probably only time for one more. But go ahead. Hi, my name's Paige Gold. I work with Steve on the information needs report. And I have a question about the political realities. We've talked about regulatory capture. We know that the National Association of Broadcasters members give a lot more money to Congress than the dispersed public who doesn't really necessarily understand how this affects them. I'm curious because I know most of the public would rather pay attention to what the Kardashians are doing than this sort of issue. On the other hand, there is a very strong segment of the populace that does watch C-SPAN and does get involved. And I'm curious as to whether y'all have a sense that this is the kind of thing where if the broadcasters succeed, whether there could be any, I don't want to say uprising, but any movement slow to perhaps get started, but eventually to force them to go ahead and put this online. I can just say that I've been incredibly heartened by the interest expressed across a wide range of organizations, both news gathering and public interest organizations. I mean, again, that's maybe not the broad public you're talking about. But I think it's been fascinating for me to see how many people are really interested and not just interested, but really energized in trying to make this project that I alluded to earlier work, which is kind of our do-it-yourself effort to put some of this information online. If the broadcasters won't, we will. And so I think if that's any reflection of broader constituencies, I think there is a lot of interest in this. I think people don't like to be spun, and they do want to know, have more information about who's trying to influence their vote. I would just second that, because Free Press is a membership organization, and a lot of what we try to do is engage our members in debates that are happening here in D.C. that will affect them. And when we reach out to people and say, hey, sign this petition, say that you want a sort of transparency, that can be a heavy lift. We thought that going out to our members and asking them to take off work so that they could rifle around in some dusty basement at a broadcast station, we figured we'd get one or two people coming in. We had emails like you couldn't believe with people who said, what are broadcasters trying to hide from me? I want this online, but if you want me to, I'll go and I'll look at it. We had one woman who took her children who are homeschooled as a civics lesson. And I think it's interesting because this whole conversation began with the idea of social contract. And I think that a lot of members of the community through new fault of their own have sort of forgotten that they have the right to demand service from their broadcaster. And a lot of times the FCC is not gonna help them do that, but there's nothing saying that the community can't reach out to their broadcasters and demand that service more directly and exercise the rights that they're already granted through transparency and through public interest obligations and sort of recharge that bargain and enforce it themselves if the government won't. And I would say something sort of about the chairman of the FCC on this. Sometimes when you have an issue where there's a lot of lobbying against the topic, it is the job of the chairman of the FCC or it is the job of the FCC to look out for a broader policy goal and that's what they're doing. At least that's what they appear to be doing so far. So I think they deserve credit for pushing ahead on this. Any last word here? And then work is already a little bit over time. Well, thank you for, thank you to the panel. And thanks to all of you for coming out or coming in on a lovely day for this. And if you're not already on our email list for events, just please, you know, sign the list on the way out. Thank you.