Barton
Rockefeller
With the mandatory transition to digital broadcasting already a confusing proposition for the TV-consuming public, the fight to delay the switchover has emerged as one of the first nasty partisan scrums of the new Obama administration.
On Wednesday, House Republicans defeated a bill that would have pushed until June 12 the deadline by which TV stations must surrender their analog spectrum allotment and begin broadcasting exclusively in digital format. That leaves the original Feb. 17 deadline for that transition intact -- at least for now.
Introduced to the House floor under special expedited conditions that required a two-thirds vote, the bill fell just 32 votes short. It can be reintroduced on the regular congressional calendar next week, when it will require only a simple majority for passage.
Even if Wednesday's defeat for the Democrats only delays the inevitable passage of the bill, however, the wrangling over when TV broadcast signals are switched over seems to fly in the face of the feel-good, bipartisan agenda widely touted in Washington only a week ago.
"The (delay) is a solution looking for a problem that exists mostly in the mind of the Obama administration," said Joe Barton (R-Texas), the top Republican on the House Commerce Committee, explaining to the Associated Press that a delay would cost TV stations a lot of money and further confuse the public.
The defeat, which came just two days after the Senate had unanimously voted for the delay, elicited an opposite yet equally caustic reaction from Senate Commerce Committee chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.).
The senator authored the bill calling for the delay amid reports by Nielsen that 6.5 million American homes still don't have the equipment necessary to receive digital broadcast signals. Further, the federal program created to subsidize acquisition of inexpensive converter boxes for these consumers is now broke.
"One thing is clear, the outgoing Bush administration grossly mismanaged the digital television transition, and consumers are confused, households are not prepared, and the program for converter boxes is broken," Rockefeller said in a statement Wednesday. "While the Senate paved the way with a bipartisan bill to repair this unfortunate situation, our Republican counterparts in the House chose to stand in the way of a workable solution."
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