TAUZIN HITS FCC'S ALLEGED FAILURE TO COMPLY WITH TELECOM ACT

NEW ORLEANS -- Digital transition, antitrust compliance and FCC’s alleged failure to follow congressional directive in enforcing 1996 Telecom Act were principal topics of House Commerce Committee Chmn. Tauzin (R-La.) at NATPE convention here Tues. “We wrote a new law in ‘96 and it’s not implemented yet” by FCC, he told reporters. If Commission had reacted properly to bill’s provisions, he said, “most of these software companies that have failed would have had a chance.”

Tauzin said success of “this digital transition is so critical. [It] had better work well for you consumers… to give full benefits of high, speedy, digital resolution programming… This is huge. This is probably the most important thing to ever happen in television.” In Congress, he said, “we're trying to do our part to make this work.” In general, he said: “I want to [wait and] see what the FCC does. The more they do, the less Congress has to do.”

In controversy over ownership, concentration and other issues, Tauzin said “as much as possible we ought to allow free expression [and] speech in America.” Asked how FCC threatened that freedom, he said “it threatens it everyday when it overregulates… the telephone companies on broadband competition… It threatens it when it regulates unnecessarily the ownership structure of media. It threatens it when it begins to regulate content.” He said Justice Dept. and FTC should handle media concentration under antitrust laws -- not FCC through its ownership rules. Later, in response to question, he said Congress abolished FCC authority over mergers “but they still do it.”

New bill covering digital copyright issues will be filed in House next month, Tauzin said, with parties currently working on compromise solution. As for effort by group of unions to restore financial syndication rules, he said in Congress “I don’t hear anything about it, [but] it could happen.”

In face of predictions this could be last NATPE convention because of defections of major syndicators, NATPE Pres. Bruce Johansen said, “Make no mistake, it was an incredibly difficult year.” Despite that, he said, NATPE “survived the year still intact [and] we are the better for it.” For this convention, he said NATPE was restructured to comply with needs of its members and as result produced “a quality conference.”