Television

The ad industry is redefining "public" television. With people fast-forwarding faster than ever through TV commercials at home, advertising companies have taken their campaigns out into the open. Perhaps you've noticed: Flat-panel screens filled with spots plugging cars, orthodontists and face-lifts are everywhere these days. They greet you at the grocery store, the coffeehouse, the bank and the service station. Most recently they've popped up in restrooms, mounted on hand dryers.

If government scientists haven't come through with solutions to the planet's environmental ills, not to worry. TV is on it. This summer, the government-relocated geniuses who comprise the fictional town of "Eureka" on the Sci Fi Channel will tackle issues such as global warming, solar energy and recycling. Season 2 will premiere Tuesday. Green issues have been sprouting up all over television in recent months.

Millions of TV sets that rely on antennas may go dark in a little more than 18 months, and the government needs to do much more to help people who own them see the light, senators said Thursday. "I think there's high potential for a train wreck here," Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) told Federal Communications Commission and Commerce Department officials during a hearing on the transition to digital-only signals.

washington -- Results of a Federal Communications Commission investigation released Friday dismissed allegations made last fall that agency officials had suppressed two media ownership studies because they disliked the results. But the findings by the FCC's inspector general, which included an e-mail from a former senior agency official that appeared to call for squelching one of the draft studies, didn't put to rest the concerns raised by the allegations. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.

On the far side of the continent, on an island covered in concrete, there runs a street of dreams familiarly called the Great White Way. And the fact that we know this, even if we have not traveled east of the Colorado (or even of Colorado Boulevard), is due as much as anything to television. A medium whose own early years were spent -- to re-punctuate George M. Cohan -- "4.5 minutes from Broadway," it has, across the years, transmitted glimpses of what goes on there to the far world.

Best Buy Co., the largest U.S. consumer-electronics retailer, stopped selling analog televisions this month in advance of the transition to digital broadcasts in 2009. The Richfield, Minn., company is the first national retailer to pull analog TVs from its shelves. It said it would stock digital-TV converter boxes starting in 2008. Best Buy is trying to fend off Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Digital television offers crystal-clear pictures, but the federal government's efforts to educate the public about the industry's switch in early 2009 is drawing heavy static from some lawmakers and broadcasters. Although the federal government has mandated that all TV stations turn off their analog signals and broadcast only in digital starting Feb. 18, 2009, congressional investigators have found that no agency is in charge of the complex transition.

Determined to sell more television ads, Internet search leader Google Inc. is sharpening its focus on the medium with demographic data from the influential Nielsen Co. Under an agreement to be announced today, Google will pay Nielsen an undisclosed amount to obtain detailed information about the kinds of people who watch specific TV shows.

A plan by the head of the Federal Communications Commission to consider major changes to media ownership rules by year's end could be derailed by growing calls for the agency to first complete a long-running study of how broadcasters serve their local communities. FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin took a major step toward wrapping up the study, begun in 2003, by holding the last public hearing on the localism issue Wednesday. Most people who spoke at the hearing, including the Rev.

As Hollywood braces for its television and film writers to go on strike as soon as Monday, more than 500 CBS News employees represented by the Writers Guild of America under a separate agreement with that network are contemplating their own job action.