The executives of four top media companies have sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission warning the agency not to implement "ill considered and unjustified government interventions" in the cable industry.

"We are alarmed at recent press accounts and public statements by FCC officials purporting to find undue concentrations of market power that would justify a wide range of government interventions into the media market place," wrote execs from News Corporation, the Walt Disney Company, Viacom, and NBC Universal on November 20th.

The four content giants delivered the missive to the FCC a week before the agency prepared to vote on whether to accept data suggesting that cable had surpassed the "70/70" rule—cable TV providers have reached 70 percent of households and 70 percent of households subscribe.

Once that threshold is passed, Federal law says that the FCC can pass additional regulations insuring greater diversity in cable transmitted video content. The Commission did not accept the data, but has required all cable companies to submit detailed stats on their subscriber levels over the next two months.

One month before the government starts issuing discount coupons for set top boxes that can convert your old analog TV set into a digital ready receiver, some San Francisco Bay Area stores may be ready to handle the traffic. But most are not.

I spent the morning doing a quickie readiness survey of the San Francisco region. I called a bunch of Target, Best Buy, and Circuit City stores and asked them two questions: "Will you be selling those digital converter set top boxes for analog TV sets soon?" and "Will you be taking those discount coupons that the Department of Commerce plans to give out for the boxes?"

"Digital set top boxes? Converters? What?" a salesperson I called at the Target in Fremont replied. After a few more seconds of confusion, he transferred our call over to a manager, who assured me that Target would be selling the converters and honoring the coupons, "when the time comes."

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a letter today warning that the U.S. analog-to-digital TV or "DTV" transition schedule "faces challenges that could affect the outcome of the program."

Specifically, the GAO says that TV retailers may not be able to start selling converter set top boxes to the public by January 1st, 2008, as planned.

"Retailers told us that March or April of 2008—3 to 4 months after consumers can begin requesting coupons—is a likely time frame for retailers to be ready to participate in the program," the document explains.

Marc Goldstein of the GAO's Physical Infrastructure Issues division sent the letter to John Dingell, Chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on November 19th. The GAO released the communication today.

The United States has set February 17th, 2009 as the last day of analog TV broadcasting. After that date all television stations in the United States and its territories must transmit via digital signals.

One thing is for certain: the cable industry is a leading cause of statistics.

Take yesterday's Federal Communications Commission decision assessing the extent of cable's national reach. At first the FCC tentatively concluded that cable video providers have collectively passed the hoped-for or dreaded "70/70" threshold: when cable systems with 36 or more live-and-in-use channels can be accessed by 70 percent of U.S. households and 70 percent of those households subscribe to them.

Once this goal post has been passed, the 1984 Cable Act permits the agency to regulate cable in order to promote greater programming diversity.

Yesterday's announcement noted that the FCC had long ago resolved that cable breached the first half of the 70/70 formula. But now the Commission stated that, for the first time, "we find that based on data from Warren Communications News, the second prong benchmark [the access prong] has been met at 71.4 percent."

But maybe not, the Notice added, given that "other data sources do not demonstrate that the second prong has been met."

United States Senators John Warner and Jim Webb have sent the Federal Communications Commission a letter asking the agency to give "every appropriate consideration" to a filing urging further relaxation of the FCC's ban on newspaper/broadcast station co-ownership.

The filing comes from the Media General corporation, which supports FCC Chair Kevin Martin's proposal to allow entities to own newspapers and broadcast stations in the same city, but opposes his plan to limit such cross-ownership to the top 20 United States markets.

"To do this based on some notion of market size, and then actually discriminating against small and mid-sized markets, should be policy anathema to the Commission," Media General wrote to the FCC on November 15th. "The Commission knows well that small and mid-sized markets are already the most at-risk for losing high quality local television news."

Media General owns newspapers and broadcast stations in many mid-sized regions in the southeast, including Virginia. These regions would not be affected by Martin's proposal, although language in his plan would allow the FCC to set aside the market definition "if the public interest, convenience, and necessity would be served."

Dissatisfied with Federal Communications Commission Chair Kevin Martin's proposal to relax the agency's longstanding ban on newspaper/broadcast station co-ownership, the Media General corporation has submitted its own plan.

M. Ann Swanson of Media General met with Monica Desai, Chief of the FCC's Media Bureau yesterday to explain why "repeal of the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rule is needed in small- and medium-sized markets" and to outline the southeastern media company's counter-proposal.

On Tuesday, November 13th, FCC Chair Kevin Martin outlined a modification of the rule that would allow co-ownership of newspapers and broadcast stations in the top twenty markets, based on Neilsen ratings. If the transaction included a TV station, the deal would have to leave eight full power TV and/or major newspapers—or "major media voices," as Martin put it—in the market intact.

Critics, including the FCC's two Democrats, quickly noted that the legal language behind the plan contains a clause in which none of Martin's criteria would be applied if "the public interest, convenience, and necessity would be served permitting an entity that owns, operates or controls a daily newspaper to own, operate or control an AM, FM, or TV broadcast station."

If there is one argument I constantly hear from advocates of media democracy, it is that the battle against media consolidation has enormous support on both sides of the political aisle.

This is a "bipartisan issue," media reform groups and advocates constantly remind us: decent Democrats and Republicans united.

"Media consolidation is too important to be reduced to partisan bickering," wrote Ryan Blethen of the Seattle Times a few days before the Federal Communications Commission ran its last hearing on its media ownership rules, held in that city on Friday.

"An independent press is at the core American democracy. That should be enough to unite and defeat what really is a threat from the Bush administration."