Lack of accessible local news frustrates rural Americans

LINCOLN, Neb. — When Dianne Johnson channel-surfs for news in her rural western Nebraska home, all she sees are stories about Colorado crime and car crashes from a Denver television station more than 200 miles away.

It’s frustrating for the 61-year-old rancher, who wants to know the latest developments in Nebraska politics and sports. When floods devastated huge swaths of Nebraska this year, Johnson struggled to keep tabs on what was happening.

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.

Johnson’s plight is part of a congressional dispute pitting local broadcasters against satellite television providers, who are frequently the only option for viewers in America’s most remote corners.

Caught in the middle are the nation’s “neglected markets” — remote areas that can’t get local broadcast signals, forcing viewers to rely on satellite service that shows them news from other states. These “neglected markets” are in rural corners Nebraska, Kentucky, Texas, Wyoming, Colorado, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Maine and Michigan.

For many of those areas, two separate issues are at play.

The first is a federal law that lets satellite providers import distant broadcast signals to those “neglected markets” at a steep discount, even though what the local news subscribers see may not be relevant.

The law was initially passed in 1988 to help small, fledgling satellite TV providers compete with cable companies that were viewed as monopolies at the time. It’s set to expire at the year’s end, but satellite providers are lobbying Congress to extend it for another five years.

If the law does expire, satellite providers would no longer be able to send distant, out-of-state programming to rural viewers and would likely have to pay more because they’d be required to negotiate with local broadcast stations. Broadcasters could then expand into areas they don’t currently reach.

The second challenge for rural viewers is a federal law that sets the boundaries for the nation’s media markets. In Nebraska, 16 rural counties are in the Denver or Rapid City media markets, based on a map drawn by Nielsen Media Research. Despite being in Nebraska, satellite television subscribers in those markets only get news from Colorado or South Dakota-based stations.