[Hollywood AHC] - Strongest possible division of US media?

So obviously, media ownership in the United States is only getting smaller in terms of numbers, and only larger in terms of spread. Historically, American governments worked somewhat to constrain mergers between different industries, including theater chains and film companies. But how do we ensure that there is as strong as possible an ownership division of films companies and theaters, television companies and stations? Are there any historical laws or motions that could effect that, efforts from the Anti-Communism period to cause butterflies, economic downturns that dramatically break up Hollywood?

Any ideas?
 
In the late 1940s of our time line, the Federal Communications Commission FCC forbade any company from owning more than five television stations. This rule inhibited the growth of a "middle-sized market" for programming. That is, there was a large market for local programming and an oligopsony for network programming, but few buyers for programming that, while lacking national appeal, might garner interest in multiple localities.

Had they been permitted to rise, chains of six or more stations would have produced "middle market" programming of their own, bought programming rejected by the three national networks, and exchanged programming with each other. This, in turn, would have led to both greater variety of options for consumers and reducing the power of CBS, NBC, and ABC. To put things another way, television of the 1950s and 1960s would have, in terms of variety, resembled that of the "syndication years" of the 1970s and 1980s.

Secondary effects of the absence of the "no more than five" rule might have included:

1. the rise of additional networks
2. increased demand for channels and thus a growth in both the number and the influence of UHF stations
3. greater diversity in news coverage

The political effect of the third secondary effect is interesting to contemplate, especially with regards to the Vietnam War.
 
I could go one step further - and for that we can look towards Argentina. After the so-called Revolución Libertadora (Liberating Revolution, which was basically a coup d'état that overthrew then-President Juan Domingo Perón in 1955) the new junta threw the doors open for completely privately-owned television on the typical Latin American model, based on what already existed in pre-Revolution Cuba. There were, however, a couple of catches - among them, the new TV stations were forbidden from creating TV networks, meaning that the economies of scale achieved in Cuba as well as in other countries within the Western Hemisphere by owning multiple TV stations did not occur. Thus, imagine what would it have been like if NYC-based television stations were limited to their coverage areas, and you'd imagine the predicament of stations based in Buenos Aires. However, they did come up with a work-around - instead of affiliating regional stations to Buenos Aires-licensed stations, the broadcasters cleverly decided to affiliate their regional stations to production companies that just so happened to be based at the broadcasters' Buenos Aires stations. What ended up happening was the regional stations could mix and match from different stations, which worked wonders in some sparsely-populated areas of the country. It also made it easier to facilitate the rise of cable television in Argentina, for understandable and obvious reasons.

Now, to translate that to the US case would be somewhat difficult, but also easier at the same time - many TV stations in the US acted along similar lines until separate stations came along which affiliated with one network or another (with a few still existing at the time of the 2009 digital TV stations, primarily in places like Glendive, MT, and Presque Isle, ME, for example), and even with that in several markets the independent stations would pick up programming pre-empted by the network affiliated who wanted to schedule local content). For example - say if a Boston Red Sox game conflicted with an NBC program on WBZ-TV (WBZ was the local NBC affiliate until the mid-1990s; this example would take us to the mid-1970s, when WBZ-TV was the main TV broadcaster of the Red Sox). In the logic of that time it was easy to drop the network program to ensure the baseball game would be on air; the resulting program would be then available to other independent stations for the taking, especially if it was a low-performing show. If TV stations were affiliated to production companies rather than actual TV networks, this could be more so the case, also increasing the number of options available for consumers.
 
A lot of what you guys are saying is very interesting. The possibility of more regionalized networks in the Northwest, Deep South, etc.. is very appealing to me in terms of map-painting and table-filling. The conceptualization of having production studios be the linkages between regional stations is also interesting, if a bit hard to visualize.

A lot of what I think about television derives from Irish and British domestic tv, which has something of a stronger public core in broadcasting. Do you think if the US had a stronger PBS from the get-go and stronger rulers against competitive national broadcasters we'd have something resembling the BBC-ITV comparison?
 
Regional TV would mean lower budgets all around thanks to...whatever the reverse of "scaling" is. Descaling? Lots of regional production facilities, talent spread out inefficiently. It's better for the technicians, actors, and creators- more of a sellers market than a buyers market- but probably worse for quality of product overall.

In this scenario radio might limp along semi-competitively next to television for another decade. TV sales are more sluggish if the product is a bit less enjoyable. News radio in particular might stay prestigious for longer if the "trusted names in news" are competing against a lot of local randos on TV. Not to say we have a second golden age of radio, just the bare viability of prestige radio broadcasting for somewhat longer.

PBS seems like an idea that would occur earlier. It is possible it would emerge in a similar form to OTL, as we've already rejected the British model with radio. It's maybe just a bit more likely we might try something like the British model ITTL, just because a unified national broadcaster is an appealing idea for a lot of reasons. More likely we just deregulate and do national broadcasters privately, but if we've got a mechanism that says that can't happen (i.e. the whole point of the thread) then a public option might be more appealing than no option.
 
@Droman : Not necessarily. What could be done, however, is to strengthen the role of universities, colleges, the Catholic Church, etc. in broadcasting and have their stations treated by the FCC and its antecedents as "general-interest" stations and not "special-interest".

Unlike the UK or many other countries, where it was originally a public/private enterprise (with the private bit usually the leading electrical and telegraph companies) which got nationalized later on, in the case of the US the concept of non-commercial or "public" broadcasting as such did not exist. What the US did have, however, was educational broadcasting, which largely served the same purpose in the early days of radio. Many of the early radio stations that signed on would be signed on either by the physics and engineering departments of various colleges as a hobby, or by universities and land-grant colleges as part of their cooperative extension departments. It's the latter which would come close to what Lord Reith envisioned for the BBC, but coming from a different basis. Over time, the educational stations would be supplemented with stations like WCFL, the voice of the US labor movement from Chicago, and a radio station run by the Pauline Fathers. When the Hoover-era FRC came out with General Order 40, these stations were relegated to the "special-interest" category, which made them easier to displace by commercial stations (which were granted the "general-interest" category and thus most of the clear channel stations, because Hoover believed that the commercial stations were more of a public-service broadcaster than stations which he saw as nothing more than propaganda stations), and thus fought for survival and lost. The fight for the survival of the educational stations was also fatally compromised by division within the movement between those (coalesced around the NCER, the National Committee on Education by Radio, which was partially funded by the Payne Fund) who wanted an independent non-commercial and educational broadcasting system (though the exact details varied considerably) and those (coalesced around NACRE) who supported the concept of "cooperative" broadcasting (that is to say educational organizations working to gather airtime on existing commercial stations). The FCC under FDR opted for the cooperative broadcasting model, which the networks initially supported and then eliminated because the educators were taking up valuable space - valuable for the networks and their profits, that is.

With that short take on public/educational broadcasting in the US before the Ford Foundation (with ETRC, later NET, which became the foundation of PBS and NPR) and Pacifica Radio came along, to me getting public broadcasting in the US alongside regional networks becomes clearer. (Also, to address @Expat 's point, both CBS and the NBC Red Network, as well as Mutual, during the Golden Age of Radio extensively used regional networks like, for example, California's Don Lee Broadcasting System and the Shepard Stores' Yankee Network covering New England, so the potential for a regional middleman is already there and which could also serve as intermediaries if we implement a TV model similar to Argentina post-1955.) To me, in the historical context of the United States during the interwar period, the split in the broadcasting reform movement between cooperative broadcasting and independent broadcasting - between NACRE and NCER - is a false dichotomy that only served to fatally weaken the movement and sowed division among the various educational stations. What would therefore need to be done early on would be to strengthen the position of educational broadcasting by achieving a two-prong strategy combining both approaches. The ideal would be a non-commercial educational system, supported by the universities (including both the Ivy League and other public and private universities) and colleges (especially the land-grant colleges) as well as cultural institutions and other organizations like the AFL and the Catholic Church, probably leading to an educational radio network similar in organization to both Mutual and especially the pillarized public broadcasting system in the Netherlands and to a lesser degree the pre-Nazi RRG in Weimar-era Germany than the unified structure of the BBC. Since it would also be likely that there would be more product than the educational stations can handle on one hand and there are many places in the US where educational stations are not feasible on the other, it would also therefore become necessary to utilize commercial radio stations to the benefit of the educational networks, via an affiliation scheme (in effect, much like PBS and NPR IOTL, albeit to a lesser degree, making the private sector equally as much of a stakeholder in the survival of educational broadcasting). This is not a new strategy - on the contrary, this was a strategy used to great effect in Canada to expand coverage of the CBC where it was not feasible to run an O&O station, and this in a country which was more favorable in its legislation to the formation of O&Os than the US. This way one can obliterate once and for all the arbitrary distinction between "general-interest" (read: commercial) and "special-interest" (read: educational) stations in favor of a more unified complementary system. The main challenge here would be to keep the educational stations educational - one can reasonably expect the stations to include in entertainment programming similar to what already existed on commercial stations, but everything would have to have some educational focus in order to maintain the original ethos of the educational broadcasting system. Then and only then would one have educational broadcasting in the US as the equal to European public broadcasting, although coming from a different tradition than the Victorian paternalism of Lord Reith.
 
The conceptualization of having production studios be the linkages between regional stations is also interesting, if a bit hard to visualize.
Regional TV would mean lower budgets all around thanks to...whatever the reverse of "scaling" is. Descaling? Lots of regional production facilities, talent spread out inefficiently. It's better for the technicians, actors, and creators- more of a sellers market than a buyers market- but probably worse for quality of product overall.

To illustrate what I mean, I'll give a couple of prototypical examples with two of Argentina's major TV channels - Canal 13, because it was essentially the model all other Argentine TV stations aspired to of replicating the traditional Latin American model within the no-network constraint which biased the TV market towards regional stations, and Telefé, because it's an adaptation of the same model in a more globalized pro-privatization era. When television first started, there was heavy investment coming in from both the US TV networks (so much so that in Buenos Aires there were three new TV stations which were "affiliated" to a network, albeit in the sense of obtaining technology rather than broadcasting American programming) and from the exodus of talent of Cuba following the Cuban Revolution, so in that sense the Cubans attempted to replicate in each of the countries they worked in the same model that worked in Cuba. Among these people was Goar Mestre, a Cuban entrepreneur who had achieved success with his CMQ network before the Revolution and would thus attempt in Argentina in conjunction with CBS and Time-Life. His main base of operations was Río de la Plata TV, LS85, Canal 13, Buenos Aires, which IIRC was modelled on his old CMQ television network - or would be were it not for Argentine law. To get around the restrictions imposed by the government, in conjunction with the formation of Río de la Plata TV he also formed a program distribution arm, Producciónes Argentina de Televisión (PROARTEL). Instead of affiliating regional stations directly to Río de la Plata TV (the normal practice IOTL in the US, but which was verboten in Argentina), PROARTEL would conclude distribution agreements with various TV stations throughout Argentina (a de facto network affiliation of sorts without calling it one, even though it would in a North American context resemble more syndication agreements). Now, theoretically PROARTEL could have functioned as a program cooperative of sorts, kinda sorta to what @Hoplophile was thinking of for middle-market stations and thus improving the quality of regional television, but that was not the point. The point of a company like PROARTEL is to function as the middleman between Buenos Aires-based TV stations and other TV stations elsewhere in the Republic, creating a one-way flow between the two (and hence the popular impression that "God is everywhere but rules from Buenos Aires"). Also, to further enhance the illusion that these are all still independent TV stations, even the Buenos Aires TV stations themselves were affiliated to the distribution arm, which coincidentally also served as the main production company - in Canal 13's case, the illusion was that it was an independent TV station that just happened to be affiliated to PROARTEL.

Now, in this type of model, there is a danger that one station would have agreements with multiple PROARTEL-like companies, a situation not uncommon in North America at this time and is still found in Mexico among Televisa's regional stations. In these cases, multiple networks (or, in Televisa's case, multiple TV channels based in Mexico City that it owns) would co-exist with local programming. From a North American viewpoint, in smaller markets this would be a good thing since it would provide a variety of programming drawing from the best each network would have to offer. This was also appealing to Argentine regional stations as well, a good portion of which were located in areas where it would have not been cost-effective to have multiple TV stations due to various factors, such as for example a small population base or a local economy that would not be strong enough to sustain a large array of TV stations. From the point of view of Buenos Aires, though, especially once the last military dictatorship fell in 1983, such a situation would be unacceptable (much like how the US TV networks gradually found the situation where local TV stations would regularly pre-empt network programming for local content very annoying and frustrating). During the dictatorship, when all the Buenos Aires TV channels were owned and operated either by the state (Canal 7 and Canal 2/La Plata) or the military (everybody else), it was natural for regional TV stations to mix programming from various sources and much more easier than when the Buenos Aires-based TV stations (Canal 7 excepted) were privately-owned. Starting in the 1980s, though, with the rise of the "Washington Consensus" and the widespread push for deregulation and privatization, Argentina's newly-privatized TV stations wanted greater control over the schedules of their regional stations, even with the constraints such as the ban on network formation. Helping in this matter was the mushrooming growth of cable television in Argentina, which allowed subscribers for the first time to have access to Buenos Aires-based TV channels and thus facilitated an intense porteñification of Argentine TV. Furthermore, with the gradual integration of Latin America as one regional television market and the recognition of Argentina as one of the main program producers (alongside Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela), the Buenos Aires-based TV stations were keen on expanding the market for Argentine programs.

The prototypical example here for the maturation of the Argentine TV model would be Telefé, an outgrowth of the privatization of Canal 11 to one of Argentina's major publishing houses (though since 2016 Telefé is now owned by Viacom). While Telefé proper is based in Buenos Aires, it uses a mix of its own programming and programming from the independent production sector in its schedule. This mixed programming is what is sent out to regional Argentina, though this time in a various amount of ways. Through its Telefé Interior subsidiary, it also owns a number of independent TV stations throughout regional Argentina (Telefé Interior here serves the same function as the old program production and distribution arm for its O&Os), albeit with greater local content in the schedule. Here is a twist on the old model - certainly before the dictatorship there were O&O stations, but these effectively functioned as local stations which just happened to have a distribution agreement with the production companies in Buenos Aires under common ownership. There are also a number of TV stations in regional Argentina which are independently-owned, though in this new age a good portion of them are commercially represented (and in fact are operated as if they were part of Telefé Interior) by Telefé itself, as well as few of the old-style affiliates with the production companies. What is different now is that there are now other ways for Telefé to saturate Argentina with its programming. In several areas, particularly areas with no terrestrial Telefé coverage (either of the main station itself or of its Telefé Interior regional stations), Telefé operates a repeater network which simulcasts the flagship Buenos Aires station as well as transmitting the same signal through cable and satellite TV (in the latter case known as Telefé Satelital and in the former case alongside the existing Telefé Interior stations). Outside of Argentina, Telefé also transmits an international version of its Buenos Aires channel; while ostensibly aimed at the Argentine diaspora to provide a link with home, its real purpose is as a promotional vehicle for Telefé to encourage other Latin American TV stations to buy more Argentine programs and in particular to enter into a distribution agreement with Telefé (and in fact in both Uruguay and Paraguay there are TV stations which for all intents and purposes are extensions of the Argentine TV model - in effect affiliates of Telefé - in their own respective countries). Only with one difference is Telefé different from other Argentine TV networks and much more in line with other Latin American TV networks. In most cases, following the traditional logic of Argentine TV, there is a big separation between the production company and their flagship Buenos Aires TV station (Canal 13 again is instructive; while PROARTEL was bought out by Clarín, one of Argentina's major newspapers, and renamed to Artear, and while Artear now owns some of its own stations in a much more direct manner than before and expanded its output to include other production companies, there is still a separation of powers between Artear and Canal 13). Telefé, however, uses the same branding not only for its flagship Buenos Aires station but also for the production company itself, which sounds very obvious to everyone else but not in Argentina. Thus there is a bit of confusion as far as Argentine law is concerned since Telefé has basically implemented what had previously been impossible, historically speaking, by gracing the name of the production company onto the major originating TV station - similar, in fact, to TV networks in North America. Such are the forces of globalization that Telefé thought in order to strengthen its brand identity it should have a consistent implementation throughout its holdings, its patrimonio propio.

That, in a nutshell, is the basic structure of the Argentine TV model, and in a US context is actually much easier to implement than at first glance. I'd basically see a bit of both Canal 13/PROARTEL and Telefé in this scenario, with some quirks along the way. As obvious examples, CBS could use Time-Life as its program distribution and syndication arm in a manner akin to PROARTEL for stations and regional networks (as Time-Life had helped CBS in its expansion in Latin America in a similar manner), while ABC had Worldvision which could be used for the same purpose. In a North American context, therefore, one could say the Argentine TV model is basically the syndication model gone amok as the default rather then as supplemental. That, plus the middle-market chains, would be interesting to see.
 
In the early fifties, it would have been extremely difficult to establish more networks or regional networks. The infrastructure was not there; you needed a cable system (between transmitters) or the AT&T microwave system that later allowed networking to cover the country. You had four networks in 1955, but CBS and NBC took the lion's share of the microwave relay bandwidth, leaving ABC and Dumont to share what was left. So, Dumont folded. Then you had the way the FCC allocated and spaced out channels. They wanted to make as much of the country as possible within range of two VHF stations. Television was very labor intense in the early years, so a flow of advertising revenue was crucial. For example, KTVO wanted to move its transmission tower from Lancaster, MO to Knox City to reach more viewers. Objection to the FCC came, not from the next closest stations, but from KOMU in Columbia, over the loss of advertising revenue from the deep northern fringe of its coverage area. Stations were very territorial. [KTVO finally moved its tower in 1988, only to see it collapse in 1989. They did not rebuild because digital TV was coming. An analog transmitter on channel 3 in Knox City reached plenty of viewers, but for digital, the location would be worthless.]
 
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Had they been permitted to rise, chains of six or more stations would have produced "middle market" programming of their own, bought programming rejected by the three national networks, and exchanged programming with each other. This, in turn, would have led to both greater variety of options for consumers and reducing the power of CBS, NBC, and ABC. To put things another way, television of the 1950s and 1960s would have, in terms of variety, resembled that of the "syndication years" of the 1970s and 1980s.
Not only was broadcast TV expensive and laborious, the fifties did not have the accumulation of filmed programs for syndication that you had in the seventies and eighties. Also, when television was constrained to three networks plus an educational outlet, there was competition to film quality shows, such as half-hour situation comedies with rehearsed scripts and carefully decorated sets. The sixties and seventies became the sources for many syndicated re-runs. Also, look at the expansion of cable TV. Early cable TV was constrained to 12 VHF channels. Locally used broadcast channels could not be used because of interference and one channel had to be reserved for "community interest." So, until cable systems could use the midband (frequencies between channels 6 and 7) and superband (above 13), cable was impossible in large cities. Finally, when de-regulation allowed long info-mercials on broadcast TV in 1984, a rash of new network came; some stayed, some went: FOX, WB, CW, UPN, Ion, Antenna, MeTV, Comet, Grit, and many more. The modern variety of programming is a function not only of technology but of FCC rules that were once protective of broadcast territory.
 
Well, what if we flipped the special and general interest classifications to have educational, religious and other such programming gain precedence. How much (however unlikely) would that have messed with things?
 
Well, what if we flipped the special and general interest classifications to have educational, religious and other such programming gain precedence. How much (however unlikely) would that have messed with things?

The only way to get something like that to work would be to abolish the distinction between general-interest and special-interest stations altogether and focus more prominence on the original classification proposed by Hoover (in an early form) based solely on technical characteristics (and which to a degree is still used in various forms in the areas covered under the 1930s/pre-WW2 NARBA) between clear-channel, regional, and local stations (including daytimers). Unless there is also a system implemented like Australia's former Class A/Class B system, the terminological "general-interest/special-interest" distinction would only serve to favor commercial broadcasters as General Order 40 was conceived. Something like the Australian system, by contrast, would be more neutral in terms of who owned what station.
 
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