Max Baucus: “I will address the pending subject, local-into-local broadcasting. At the end of the last session of Congress, there was…”

“I will address the pending subject, local-into-local broadcasting. At the end of the last session of Congress, there was some talk that in this session of Congress, this year, we would take up financing to help guarantee local-into-local television coverage in rural areas. Frankly, I wasn't happy with the way we were about to leave the last session of Congress, so I stood up on the floor and tossed a little bit of obstruction around until we got a firmer commitment that by a certain date we would bring up legislation in this body directed toward financing satellites or other entities so that we could provide local-into-local coverage throughout our country. I am very happy now that this bill is before us. As a consequence of the deference of myself and others, we are now here. Very simply, the need for this is extremely important. This chart shows markets that aren't now covered and will be covered under the basic bill to be passed. There aren't very many of them. The red dots depict areas where people can get local-into-local coverage. There are 210 TV markets in our country. You can tell that the red dots don't number 210. In fact, they number something much less than that. I might say that number 210 happens to be right up here--Glasgow, MT. Butte, I think, is 167, and there is Billings. We have a bunch of TV markets in our State, but they are nowhere near where the read dots are. With the passage of last year's bill, 67 markets will have coverage.”