So You Want To Own A Tv Station

Ted Turner never did knock over CBS. But he's done a hell of a job on Don Moore.

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For Don Moore, the troubles began just about a year ago.It was July 19, 1985, one of those sparkling clear summer days on Cape Cod when fishermen are out of Chatham harbor by 6 a.m. and Route 28 is bumper-to-bumper with beach traffic well before noon. At 9 a.m. that morning, 1.2 million watts of broadcast signal beamed out over the Cape Cod peninsula for the first time from a tower in West Barnstable, Mass., and Don Moore sat back in quiet celebration. All those years working his way up through the ranks of broadcasting had now brought him his own television station. A $2.5-million gamble looked as if it were about to pay off.

Later that same day, at 1:07 p.m., a seemingly routine story, datelined Washington, D.C., came clattering over the Associated Press wire machine in the newsroom of WCVX. It read: "The U.S. Court of Appeals today threw out the federal requirement that cable television systems carry all local broadcast stations." Don Moore took one look at the lead paragraph and, as he remembers it, "I damn near died."

What Moore understood was that, in a single stroke, a panel of three federal judges had changed the rules of American television, disturbing the careful balance of power and profits between over-the-air broadcasters, who used to own the television industry, and over-the-wire operators of cable television systems, who now control access to 50% of TV households. The court's decision was to deregulate in an area of communications law in which even the deregulation-minded Reaganites of the Federal Communications Commission had declined to act. The effect on Channel 58 in Hyannis was immediate and profound: the station lost the majority of its potential audience, and its fate was put in the hands of its competitors.

Moore himself was not even a party to the court case, brought against the FCC by a small cable company in Washington State and ultimately joined by Atlanta superstation owner Ted Turner. Their complaint was with a 20-year-old FCC regulation called the "must-carry" rule, requiring cable operators to carry all the broadcast signals in their region as part of the basic service to all subscribers. In the days when cable operators were started for programming, local broadcast signals were a matter not of "must carry" but "want to carry" -- better reception of broadcast signals, not better programming, was what drove the early cable industry. But now with superstations like Turner's and dozens of programming services to choose from, cable operators want the freedom to choose from the offerings that will make cable service most attractive. As important, cable operators have begun to compete head-to-head with local broadcasters for the sale of commercial airtime. "Must carry" means that cable operators carry not only the broadcasters' programs, but their advertising as well.

The legal assault was framed in more lofty terms. "Must carry," they argued, was an infringement on the constitutional right to commercial free speech, the right of a cable company to carry whatever program it chooses on the limited number of channels that cable systems can offer. The FCC, in defense of its "must-carry" regulation, argued that there was a substantial government interest in protecting "localism" in TV broadcasting that justified "must carry," and outweighed the claim to commercial free speech. The judges didn't see it that way. "The 'must-carry' rules are fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment," wrote Judge J. Skelly Wright.

The ruling affected different stations in different ways, but perhaps no broadcaster was affected more than Don Moore. His Channel 58 was to be one of about 100 stations newly authorized by the FCC to serve small markets. But the population he was hoping to serve -- Cape Cod, the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, and southeastern Massachusetts -- was more heavily cabled than most: 11 cable companies serving about 130,000 subscribers. Unless those 11 operators were to agree to carry Channel 58, which was unlikely, its signal would be effectively unavailable to 60% of the households in the region.

Well, not quite unavailable. Moore has tried to convince viewers that, even with their cable connections, they can see Channel 58, too. All they have to do, he explains, is switch off the cable controls and hook up an antenna to the back of the set, either in the TV room or on the roof, and then let 'er rip. ("No, ma'am, the remote control that comes with the cable hookup won't work if you do that.") Needless to say, this pitch hasn't been all that convincing.

So for the past year, Don Moore has been living out an answer to an old philosophical question: if a tree falls in the forest but there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? From 7 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., seven days a week, Moore is putting a signal out from his $2.5-million plant, which secures the $2.5-million line of credit that allows him to meet his payroll and keep the station on the air. But who is watching? It's hard to say. So far, advertisers are slow to buy commercial airtime, which Moore is offering at bargain-basement rates by broadcasting standards -- $50 per 30-second spot on the local news show -- but still several times what the subscriber-supported cable systems are charging. And Moore is also offering videotape production and editing time at rates most Boston producers would consider a steal. In a good month, Moore takes in about $30,000, or about $120,000 less than his expenses. "I've got a year," he shrugs. "Maybe."

The funny thing is that Donald P. Moore is anything but a stranger to the communications business. He learned it from ther ground up, starting as an engineer for radio and television stations in Boston. More at home with the details of sophisticated equipment than sophisticated business plans, he was still among the first to see the coming business potential of Cape Cod. Hyannis's own John Kennedy was President when Moore took preliminary steps toward winning a Cape Cod radio station license in 1961. It took nine years, two applications, 23 separate FCC filings, and one hell of a lot of perseverance before Moore finally won approval in June 1970 to operate WQRC-FM.

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