Two days before the nation's television stations switch off their analog signals, the acting chairman of the Federal Communications Commission visited Los Angeles to warn that too many Southern California residents still weren't ready for the change Friday to all-digital TV broadcasts.
Michael J. Copps said he feared that as many as 20% of households in major U.S. cities still rely on over-the-air analog broadcasts. Most of those households are non-English speaking, elderly or low-income, he said.
Copps, sporting a blue oxford shirt emblazoned with a Digital Television Transition logo, criticized the outreach efforts made under the Bush administration. President Obama postponed the date for the transition to June 12 from Feb. 17. That gave public agencies time to reach more homes.
In a visit Wednesday to The Times, Copps made a number of points:
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How do you think the transition is going to go?
I think things are going to go considerably better than they would have gone had we gone ahead on Feb. 17.
They will not go as well as they would have gone had we been sufficiently serious about this four years ago instead of four months ago.
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What was not being done to help people prepare?
No. 1, we should have done this in a more transitional phase rather than just all at one time, just like they did in the U.K. Second, we lacked any commitment to do any in-home assistance so that you could help provide assistance to people who were senior citizens, people with disabilities or people for whom English is not their primary language.
We lacked walk-in centers and help clinics. We didn't have an adequate coupon converter program. Our program ran out of money in January of this year. Had we gone ahead in February, we would have had a consumer backlash of considerable magnitude. Now there will still be some level of disruption, but it's better than it would have been.
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What have you been able to do in the last four months?
We've turned the Federal Communications Commission into a grass-roots organization. We've gone from being a regulatory agency staying in our building on the shore of the Potomac River to actually getting people out.
We have more than 200 field agents out in 20 or more markets to do outreach. We put together a call-center operation. Starting today, it's 24/7. We'll have up to 4,000 operators this weekend to be on duty answering calls.
