Spencer Cox: “I share the goals of the sponsors of this legislation. The fundamental problem is simple: There are, according to the…”

“I share the goals of the sponsors of this legislation. The fundamental problem is simple: There are, according to the Congressional Budget Office, 3 million people in America who do not get over the air free television and who do not get cable, so they cannot get their local TV, 3 million people. Now, until 1999, Congress made it illegal for satellite TV providers to put local stations into the homes of those people. We fixed that with SHVA, with the Satellite Home Viewer Act, a short while ago; but there remains a catch. In order to deliver even one local station into a market, the satellite provider has to deliver all of the locally originated stations. Now naturally, the satellite providers trying to make money are going to start with the big markets like Los Angeles and New York, and in my TV market of southern California, where Los Angeles dominates, there are so many locally originated TV stations, scores of them, that it fills up all the satellite capacity. What we have essentially said, by way of Federal regulation, is that it is more important for people who live in big TV markets, in big cities, to get all of the locally-originated TV stations, even if they do not have any local content by the way, than it is for people who live in rural America to get just one. We are doing nothing about that unfair mandate in this bill.”