FCC Notice on DBS Public Interest Obligations, November 1998

Before the FCC 98-307

FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION
Washington, D.C. 20554

In the Matter of Implementation of Section 25 of the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992 Direct Broadcast Satellite Public Interest Obligations

MM Docket 93-25

REPORT AND ORDER

Adopted: November 19, 1998
Released: November 25, 1998

By the Commission: Chairman Kennard issuing a statement; Commissioners Furchtgott-Roth; Powell and Tristani dissenting in part and issuing seperate statements. TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION

II. BACKGROUND

III. SUMMARY

IV. DISCUSSION paragraph

A. Definition of Providers of DBS Service

1.

DBS ruling: FCC reserves 4% of channels for education

Direct broadcast satellite companies will have to set aside 4 percent of their video channel capacity for noncommercial educational programming, the FCC said last week. For a DBS operation like DirecTV/USSB, with around 200 channels, that would make eight for education. The companies will get to choose the provider of each channel. The vote Nov. 19 [1998] ended a long wait for set-aside rules.

Can public radio learn to talk to its Gen-X future?

Public radio’s Gen-X listeners don’t fit their generational stereotype; they’re closer to its older audience than to their peers, said a report from public radio’s Audience 98 research project. Pubradio programmer J. Mikel Ellcessor comments and then trades letters to the editor with the Audience 98 researchers. Dan Yankelovich and Pete Townshend: are they the conceptual bookends of generational cohort analysis? In the mid-1960s, Dan Yankelovich explained the “generation gap” and introduced the world-at-large to generational cohorts. These “cultural variations in time” articulate the enduring importance of key life-stage experiences, and the social context within which they occur.

American Experience: where we’ve come from

On a warm summer day in 1946 I find myself, somewhat improbably, at the helm of a U.S. Navy ocean tug, threading through a crowded, palm-fringed Pacific atoll called Bikini. We stay only long enough to anchor the derelict ship we’ve towed here from the Philippines. Several days later, making slow progress east to Honolulu, we learn that the wreck we had pulled into that pristine island sanctuary had been obliterated — along with everything else in the lagoon — by two atomic bombs. More than a few of my shipmates are bitter that, unlike others, they had been denied an extremely close look at the destruction. But for most of us it is simply an isolated event, one among many in those rather bewildering post-war days following the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.