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City of license, an education, please

T

texas_prwriter

I'm really not trying to stir up a hornet's nest with this question, but this issue has piqued my interest lately: what purpose does the city of license serve? In my short (30-year) life, it doesn't seem like it. Does it really matter to Arlington (KLTY), Flower Mound (KTYS), Highland Park (KVIL), Allen (KESN), Denton (KHKS), etc. that a radio station is licensed there? For that matter is Fort Worth served when most of the stations licensed to it broadcast from Arlington, Irving or Dallas?

I'm not trying to attack anybody. I'm asking two academic questions here (and you guys are as bright of people as I know in radio issues): (1) Does the city of license matter any more? and (2) Should it?

I plan on lurking for any discussion that might pop up, but if it gets juicy, I may drop back in. Thanks.
 
texas_prwriter said:
I'm really not trying to stir up a hornet's nest with this question, but this issue has piqued my interest lately: what purpose does the city of license serve? In my short (30-year) life, it doesn't seem like it. Does it really matter to Arlington (KLTY), Flower Mound (KTYS), Highland Park (KVIL), Allen (KESN), Denton (KHKS), etc. that a radio station is licensed there? For that matter is Fort Worth served when most of the stations licensed to it broadcast from Arlington, Irving or Dallas?

I'm not trying to attack anybody. I'm asking two academic questions here (and you guys are as bright of people as I know in radio issues): (1) Does the city of license matter any more? and (2) Should it?

I plan on lurking for any discussion that might pop up, but if it gets juicy, I may drop back in. Thanks.
Click to expand...

You have two very valid questions.

When the country's broadcasting system was being set up many decades ago, stations were required to provide a public service to their community. The city of license was a way to define your community and also allowed the FCC to properly allocate stations so that as many cities as possible were served, and large cities had enough stations serving them. Over the years, the public service requirement has been relaxed quite a bit. It's now good enough to just put on some public affairs programming on Sunday mornings that address broad issues of concern to people in your listening area. A specific focus on your city of license is not really required.

As it is now, the city of license is really nothing more than a technical designation for frequency allocation. You can decide for yourself whether that's a good thing.
 
Yeah when they starting messing radio up in the late 80's then the stupidity act of'96,station's license allocation became window dressing. They figured if the station 's programming signal was originating in Dallas( for example) and could be heard in Granbury(where the suggested license is appointed) it was still serving Granbury. Sad but true and the first gong of the death knell to be "live and local". Only CONsultants,owners,sales welcomed this birth of a dark era.
 
texas_prwriter said:
Does it really matter to Arlington (KLTY), Flower Mound (KTYS), Highland Park (KVIL), Allen (KESN), Denton (KHKS), etc. that a radio station is licensed there? For that matter is Fort Worth served when most of the stations licensed to it broadcast from Arlington, Irving or Dallas?
Click to expand...

The lines have been blurred, whether it's what constitutes a "community" or what relevance it has today in light of the FCC's rules and their role in managing the allotment of channels. On the first issue, consider this: with urban sprawl it's often hard to tell where one "community" ends and another begins. Is Flower Mound that far removed from neighboring Highland Village, or is Allen worlds apart from adjacent areas of Plano or McKinney? Or is all "The Metroplex"?

We hear about low voter turnout for city elections and lack of community involvement from residents of smaller cities. This may be coupled with or exacerbated by their residents tendency (or desire) to identify with a larger metropolitan area (D/FW, Orange County, Chicagoland etc.). Whether it's a matter of complacency, convenience or a combination of those and other factors is a subject for lengthy debate. That debate would have to include factors like the internet and the relevance of the small-town newspapers. Then there's the treatment of local news by broadcast media; items that might be of interest to a "community of license" of less than 5,000 persons are often deemed to be of little importance in a metropolitan area of over five million. Who decides whether something is relevant?

The COL rules have been tempered by a litany of complicated court cases and purported showings of "service" to particular communities. In practice they actually discourage a radio or TV's commitment to serve their COL by allowing stations to relocate through feigning interest in one small area of a much larger metropolis. Basically an applicant must show that improved "service" overall outweighs any perceived loss at the old community of license. It's accomplished by showing what "service" would still exist there and often there are proposals for replacement channel assignments. In addition applicants must successfully argue that the new COL is, in fact, a separate, licensable community.

Should it matter? To whom, the FCC, the city or town as an entity, or each of its citizens? Ask the residents of smaller towns who lost a favorite radio station to a large city. Some of them might sound off but others would probably correctly assume that there's little they could have done to prevent it. Or ask the people who live in a newly-designated "COL" if they know they have a new station in town, even if it's in name only. Then ask them if they'd like their new station to serve their specific local needs.

Thanks for posing the questions, but please don't sit on the sidelines too long; if you want "an education" on the city of license issue, help us out by contributing your thoughts on what "service" means to you.
 
"To serve the public interest as a public trustee"

Those words have resonated with me ever since I read my first license renewal liner, way back in 1976. In my mind, the public airwaves are to be used by broadcasters to provide a service to the public (us), whose tax dollars support the vast government behemoth that grants these broadcasters their licenses to use their small sliver of spectrum. That means (to me, at least) that broadcasters should not be permitted to air anything that insults people (O&A, etc.), creates a false sense of urgency (just about any so-called talk show), or purports to present facts without attribution (again, talk shows, and some erzats newcasts). And don't get me started about "free speech" - the 1st Amendment doesn't give people the right to say hurtful or insulting things (just as the Supreme Court ruled that people don't have the right to yell "fire" in a crowded theater).

The TV spectrum is now about to be auctioned off, but here's where I seem to be missing something - aren't the airwaves supposed to be "public"? And if they are "public," then don't they belong to us? And shouldn't we be getting a cut of that pie?

If the airwaves don't belong to us, then broadcasters technically have no requirement to serve us. If the opposite is true, then we should be holding people accountable.

That's what "service" means to me. But that's just my opinion (clearly labeled as such :D)
 
This is a button-pusher for me. For all practical purposes, city of license has become meaningless, and that's not a good thing.

The reason for city-of-license is localism -- service to the local community. To me, that means local news, community announcements, sports, and entertainment that's apprpropriate to the city of license, not to a metro area of five-million people 50 miles away that already has too many stations on the air. It is the height of cynicism on the part of the FCC to issue and the broadcasters to take a license for Gainesville or Farmersville or Howe, and then completely ignore those communities.

The whole notion of public service in broadcasting needs to be restored (granted, it has always been somewhat vague). Too often, public nuisance is more like it.
 
It's tough for the FCC to require over-the-air stations to do much community service when their satellite counterparts can operate with so few restrictions and at a much lower cost.

Still, with so many stations in, for instance, the DFW market, some barely make it and try changing formats again and again. You'd think they could carve out a niche by choosing to SERVE a specific community.
 
What does "service" mean to me? It means there is a source in the community of local information -- be it news, the oft-talked about weather, sports, etc. I always find it funny to me that (pre-96) a resident in Granbury, Weatherford, Mineral Wells, Gainesville, etc., had a better chance of knowing what was happening in his community whether it was high school sports, city council races or whatever than one in Dallas or Fort Worth, with all the TV and radio coverage. "Local" radio played a big roll in that.

I certainly think there are some stations that do well serving the public interest (KKDA-AM, WBAP, KCBI and KRLD, all to varying degrees do that). But how do they define local? KKDA seems to define it by race, WBAP by politics, KCBI by religion and KRLD by a desire for news. (I'm generalizing, but you get the idea).

Although we're in the same market, I'd wager folks in Kennedale don't think they have a lot in common with folks in Wylie, and vice versa. How many people in Richardson or Mesquite griped about all the coverage the April 13 tornado in Haltom City got because it was "all the way over there?" And how many in Haltom City would have griped if the tornado were in Haltom City or Keller?

In my estimation, broadcaster's definition of "local" is too big. I live in Tarrant County. Just don't care about events in Collin County. My Collin County co-workers feel much the same about Tarrant County. We like each other, have visited each others homes, but "local" to those of us in Arlington or Fort Worth or Pelican Bay is not "local" to Melissa, Anna or Allen.

Now, that's just one man's opinion. What if stations got more local? It's really the only way to "beat" satellite radio. Would it make any difference? Or, would we just end up with a Jack FM in Fort Worth and one in Dallas? :)
 
texas_prwriter said:
In my estimation, broadcaster's definition of "local" is too big. I live in Tarrant County. Just don't care about events in Collin County. My Collin County co-workers feel much the same about Tarrant County. We like each other, have visited each others homes, but "local" to those of us in Arlington or Fort Worth or Pelican Bay is not "local" to Melissa, Anna or Allen.
Click to expand...

Excellent point, and I can relate to it (from a slightly older perspective!). I was in a discussion last week that dealt with the Dallas mayoral race, and it was pointed out that about 75-percent of the population around here doesn't live in Dallas. Additionally Fort Worth is among the fastest growing major cities in the country, and generally its residents really don't care about who sits in the mayor's chair thirty miles to the east.

For many decades Dallas and Fort Worth rarely agreed on anything before they finally hammered out plans for the joint venture that gave us D/FW Airport. Dallas got first billing on that one; prior to that Dallas had the fledgling the Dallas Cowboys while Fort Worth folks enjoyed Cats baseball. Later on Fort Worth begrudgingly accepted that awful moniker that lumped them into the "Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex." Then over the years virtually all their radio stations relocated to be closer to Dallas, including their beloved WBAP, which moved their studios to Arlington (still in Tarrant County, admittedly) but, to hear Fort Worth folks tell it, their programming took on a decidedly Dallas slant. The old rivalry is still there, and now with Collin County thrown into the mix, it's no wonder that many Fort Worth residents feel like they're still being ignored. From the standpoint of local radio "service" they've got a point.
 
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