"MUST CARRY" LAW

The development of the cable television industry has revolutionized the way most Americans watch television. Until the 1960s, television signals were broadcast through the air into people's homes and picked up by receivers in the television sets. Such signals used the electromagnetic spectrum, which has limited frequencies, and could only travel relatively short distances. Because of these technological limitations, Congress, through the Federal Communications Commission, claimed the power to regulate BROADCASTING in order to license and control the use of the limited number of frequencies or "channels" and to impose certain content restrictions and public interest obligations on the broadcasters given those licenses.

Because of the short range of broadcast signals, viewers could only receive programs transmitted by local broadcasting "stations," and people in remote areas got very poor signal reception. Cable television fundamentally changed the picture. First, cable transmits video signals through fiberoptic cables, not electromagnetic frequencies, and thus has the capacity to carry dozens, if not hundreds, of different channels at one time. Second, by transmitting their signals through cable wires, rather than through the air, cable operators can easily send their programs to distant places.

Initially, cable was used primarily to improve reception of broadcast stations in crowded urban or remote rural areas. But because of the large number of channels a cable station could transmit, the cable industry developed a large number of new sources of programming, and hundreds of new cable networks, such as Nickelodeon, The Discovery Channel, and Cable News Network (CNN), were created. Because of better reception and wider programming, cable soon became the source of transmission of programming to approximately 60 percent of the households in America.

Broadcasters felt threatened by this new source of programming and, more importantly, by the control that cable operators had over the broadcasters' ability to reach their audience. The broadcasters were dependent on cable operators to carry their programs over cable wires into homes that had switched to cable. Yet, the broadcasters were in competition with the cable industry over channels and programming. What was to keep the local cable company from refusing to carry the local broadcasting stations in order to enhance the market for the new cable networks and programs? And, if broadcasters were forced out of business, they argued, that would reduce the diversity of programming, and also harm the 40 percent of the American families that did not subscribe to cable. Cable operators had a "chokehold" over broadcasters and television programming.

At the urging of the broadcast industry and others, Congress passed the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992. That law mandated that all cable operators had to carry a reasonable number or percentage of "local commercial television stations" and local "noncommercial educational television stations" among the channels on their cable systems. The larger the number of channels, the more broadcast stations the system had to carry. Overall, the result was that approximately one-third of the channels on any cable system had to be made available for use by local commercial or noncommercial broadcast stations.

These "must carry" rules were challenged as violating the FIRST AMENDMENT rights of cable operators and programmers. But in a 1994 ruling, TURNER BROADCASTING SYSTEM V. FCC, the Supreme Court held that those rules were constitutional.