In many rural corners of America, television viewers who want to watch local news are instead stuck with irrelevant stories from out-of-state stations hundreds of miles away.
In this Nov. 21, 2019 photo, Shannon Booth, vice president and general manager for Gray Television who oversees company-owned Nebraska stations in Lincoln, Hastings and North Platte, poses for a photo in front of the KOLN television station's satellite dishes in Lincoln, Neb. An estimated 500,000 households nationwide don't have access to local broadcast channels because of a complicated federal law and a decades-long dispute between local broadcasters and satellite television providers.
Johnson is among an estimated 870,000 households nationwide that receive at least one distant network affiliate’s feed from their satellite TV service providers because they don’t live close enough to get conventional over-the-air signals.
“Instead of a tornado hitting the ground in North Platte, they’re hearing about sunny beaches in L.A.,” said Shannon Booth, a general manager for Gray Television who oversees the company’s stations in Lincoln, Hastings and North Platte. Satellite TV providers argue that that law protects consumers by requiring broadcasters to negotiate in good faith over the fees that satellite companies are required to pay them for access to their shows. Even with the law in place, those fees have risen from $215 million in 2006 to $11.9 billion this year, according to the American Television Alliance, a satellite and cable TV industry group. The expense is often passed along to subscribers.
Booth, though, said doing so would be practically impossible because it would require federal approval, and for nearly a decade, the FCC has prohibited stations from expanding their transmission facilities or constructing new TV translators that would widen their reach.
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