Looking back at the last eleven years or so, I haven’t always been a big fan of the FCC. I admit, it’s easier to sit back here and complain about them than it is to actually do their jobs. This is especially true in a position like theirs where you never hear about the good stuff. I have to imagine that the FCC does thousands and thousands of things right every year and I never say anything. But let them do something I think is wrong, and you can count on me and scores of other bloggers to notice.
Back in 2017…
…I wrote an article about how, “Maybe the FCC doesn’t care about your city.” In it, I detailed the FCC rule change which meant that local TV stations were no longer required to have on-site production facilities. It was a largely symbolic move, because obviously video can be produced from anywhere, by anyone with a phone. But it was just one more step away from the idea that local stations are required to serve the communities in which they broadcast. I wondered what effect this would have on the future.
Well, here we are in the future.
Somehow, we all survived this rule change. It wasn’t even the hardest thing we survived in the last five years.
Five years on, we’ve all learned how to live remote lives more than we ever hoped. We’ve seen all sorts of TV shows produced from people’s houses. And, our small cities and towns haven’t completely fallen apart as a result of it. I can’t help thinking that we’ve still lost something, but perhaps on balance we didn’t lose as much as we gained. TV stations are still here for us, local channels still report local things, and the world didn’t stop turning.
In the meantime, we’ve all learned a little bit about what being “local” really means. And I’d like to think we’ve learned a little bit more to treasure those things around us, those things in our neighborhoods, because we still remember how we had to go without them for way too long. When that happened, we relied on local television to tell it like it is. And for the most part, they did. It didn’t matter that the production facility was in a different city or state. We still got the local perspective and we had plenty of . That’s the real lesson.
The next five years
I think the next five years will be a real challenge for broadcast television. A lot of people expected a surge in local interest due to the next-generation television standard. but it’s hard to know if that will ever happen. In the meanwhile, a lot of local content is moving to the internet, thanks to free streaming services like Pluto. It doesn’t make that content less local, but it does change the way you get it.
Just remember, unless there’s another rule change from the FCC, you have the right to get free local over-the-air broadcasts just by putting up an antenna. You don’t have to pay for them and you don’t have to get internet to receive them. It’s a freedom we can all enjoy, and it’s one worth preserving.
