The FCC Spectrum Auction and the Future of Public Broadcasting: The Case at MSU and Greater Lansing

Michigan State University (MSU) held a lively forum on 4 January 2016 to discuss the pending decision by the university on whether or not to participate in the FCC’s spectrum incentive auction. A second forum will be held on the 11th of January at 7pm in the College of Communication Arts & Sciences.

What might sound like a technically and financially arcane set of issues came to life for many in the questions of the 300 some participants who packed the auditorium on the 4th of January. It appeared as if every-other person attending the forum had their hand up at some point to comment or ask a question. Credit to MSU for holding these forums, and to the University’s President, Lou Anna Simon (2015), for being interviewed on WKAR’s ‘Current State’ in December about the pending decision.

If MSU were to auction off its broadcasting spectrum, as explained at the forum, this would spell the end of over-the-air (OTA) broadcasting of WKAR public television. Not being over the air, it will lose its financial support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and its must carry status for cable and satellite providers. While it will not affect WKAR radio, it would threaten the existence of public broadcasting in the greater Lansing community, and similar communities, as well as the vitality of public broadcasting nationally (CPB 2014: chapter 3). Not surprisingly, the audience on 4 January was ‘overwhelmingly negative’ (Wolcott 2016).

Why do this?

As the auction suggests, the ‘incentive’ is financial. Potentially hundreds of millions of dollars for the University, with no strings attached on how it is spent. However, there are seriously hard questions that need to be addressed before deciding whether such eye-watering payoffs for the University would really be a windfall or even justified at this point in time.

First, the same spectrum is likely to increase in value in the near future. Wireless is the most dynamic, fastest growing infrastructure for the development of innovative approaches to connectivity generally, but also mobile Internet, the Internet of Things, and future sensor networks associated with intelligent cities and transportation (Dutton et al 2014). There is little question that wireless spectrum is poised to become far more valuable than it is now, and within a short space of time. There is almost no question that any price MSU receives now will be short of what it will be worth in the space of 5-10 years. So is this too soon to auction it off, even if viewed on purely financial terms?

Secondly, those in the community who depend on OTA television will lose access to public television, and WKAR in particular. Only about three-fourths of Michiganians are online. In central Lansing, this could be closer to fifty percent. And many residents of the greater Lansing community are dependent on over-the-air broadcasting. The elderly, minorities, rural residents, and the less well to do, are among the most dependent on OTA broadcasting, and most in need of good high-quality programming, educational, and public-oriented programming (Lawson 2015).

Many believe that the Internet and related digital media will compensate for this loss. The idea is that digital media, such as the Internet, can be used to replace lost spectrum. In the short-term (for the next 5-10 years at least) this is a false hope. There are a growing number of ‘cord-nevers’ (never subscribing to cable or satellite services) and cord-cutters (those who stop subscribing) because they rely more on Internet access and streaming video services. This will reduce the likelihood of cable and satellite providers carrying public broadcasting.

Moreover, the fact that more people are moving to view television and film content over the Internet is not to say that everyone is. The reality is far from this imagined future. Digital divides in access to the Internet have been persistent in developed nations, such as the United States, and will not be closed in the next five to ten years. Michigan is about average among states across the US in access to the Internet, but that covers up major variations across socioeconomic groups, where access is dramatically variable.

Nor will the divide be fixed by other technical innovations. A digital switchover could provide better OTA broadcasting and more capacity, but that will not happen for years. New standards, such as ATSC 3.0 (Advanced Television Standards Committee 3.0), could diffuse as early as 2017. This new standard would improve the quality, spectrum efficiency, interactivity and mobile access, compared with current 1.0 standards, enabling a station like WKAR to broadcast content simultaneously receivable on phones, tablets, computers and home TV displays of standard, high definition and the ultra high def 4K video. ATSC 3.0 would be a ‘game changer’, but WKAR could not seize these opportunities if it lost this spectrum a year before they become active (Reid 2006). Moreover, the use of other platforms (e.g., Internet streaming, cable) comes with additional costs both for the content producer (should MSU continue to be) and the audience. An Internet provision of Lansing’s public television content would need huge funding to be competitive to viewers when TV remains the dominant media for news and entertainment. So again, with patterns of use still lagging far behind developments in new technology, is it too soon to cut off many in the community from over-the-air public broadcasting?

Thirdly, the spectrum was loaned to MSU for the purpose of providing public service broadcasting and information. All scenarios of this auction suggest that the funds received would be repurposed for other activities that might merit support on their own terms, but will not fulfill the public broadcasting purposes that formed the basis for MSU obtaining this spectrum. For example, the President of MSU suggested the proceeds could be placed into MSU’s endowment as a means to ensure its longevity, even though it is not a gift per se to the university (Simon 2015).

This is not a legal issue so much as one of public and community trust in the University fulfilling the spirit of public broadcasting or any other purpose for which money is given. The idea that the same content will be provided via other channels – meeting its obligation – is not plausible with the loss of PBS support and must carry status.

Finally, a number from the audience of the forum raised concerns over MSU losing a major platform for teaching. Many students are drawn to MSU to study broadcast production, and media production, generally. It is true that there are good universities, with strong schools of communication and media studies that do not have a public television studio and station. But why surrender one of MSU’s differentiating, strategic advantages in attracting and training its undergraduate students? It may be that more of a role in teaching could, and should, be made of WKAR’s presence at MSU, but auctioning off its OTA broadcast channel would undermine these opportunities.

In short, there are real issues revolving around the financial wisdom, public service obligations, the regional community, inequities, and educational opportunities tied to this decision. From my perspective, it is not simply an issue of either/or, but also of timing. I hope I am not seen as one of those so-called ‘naysayers’, to use Mark Bashore’s term in his interview with President Simon. Five to ten years from now, it is most likely that the spectrum will be far, far more valuable, and more people will be digitally connected, even if not online. Whether based on a matter of principle, or sound financial management, it might well be best to relinquish at this time.

So I am delighted that MSU is continuing to explore these issues. Perhaps there is good evidence to challenge each of these reservations I’ve outlined. In that spirit, I am looking forward to the second forum, and the potential to follow the Lansing case as a concrete, real world example of the opportunities, threats, and prospects for public broadcasting in the United States.

Bill Dutton
A personal perspective that does not necessarily represent the views of the Quello Center or any other organization.

References

CPB (2014), Corporation for Public Broadcasting, White Paper on Spectrum Auction and Repacking. 7 August. http://www.cpb.org/spectrum/reports/CPB-White-Paper-on-Spectrum-Auction-and-Repacking-Process.pdf?pdf=CPB-White-Paper

Dutton, William H. and Law, Ginette and Groselj, Darja and Hangler, Frank and Vidan, Gili and Cheng, Lin and Lu, Xiaobin and Zhi, Hui and Zhao, Qiyong and Wang, Bin, Mobile Communication Today and Tomorrow (December 4, 2014). A Quello Policy Research Paper, Quello Center, Michigan State University. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2534236 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2534236

Lawson, J. (2015), ‘Minority, public TV viewers face greatest threat in FCC auction’, 31 August: http://current.org/2015/08/minority-public-tv-viewers-face-greatest-threat-in-fcc-auction/

Reid, G. (2016), Comments at the MSU Forum, 4 January.

Simon, L.A. (2015), President Lou Anna Simon speaking on the future of WKAR-TV signal ‘to be determined in 2016’. Interview with Mark Bashore, 21 December 2015: http://wkar.org/post/pres-simon-future-wkar-tv-signal-be-determined-2016#stream/0

Wolcott, R.J. (2016), ‘Residents Concerned About Potential WKAR-TV Sale’, Lansing State Journal, January 5: 3A, 5A.

Notes

Primary takeaways

Digital inequality shows larger impacts on youth academic performance as compared to time spent on screens.
Digital skills play a significant role in mediating unstructured online engagement (social media use, playing video games, browsing the web) and youth academic, social, and psychosocial development.
Unstructured online engagement and face-to-face social interaction are complementary and continuously interact to create and enhance youth capital outcomes.

A familiar story: concerns of screen time

Today’s discussions of adolescent well-being have coalesced around a clear narrative: teenagers spend too much time online, and their academic performance, mental health, and social lives are deteriorating as a result. A steady stream of academic papers, books, and op-eds, alongside a growing number of policy proposals––school phone bans, age-gated social media use, restrictive screen-time limits––rest on the same underlying claim, aligning with a contemporary, digitized version of the displacement hypothesis:

Screen time, particularly the unstructured, free-time spent on social media, gaming, watching video content, or browsing the web, is said to displace the productive face-to-face activities that build adolescents into capable adults.

The implied and often practiced solution is restriction. In response, this dissertation tested this claim directly, and placed it within the broader context of adolescence.

Across three years, I followed 653 Michigan adolescents from early through late adolescence: in grades 8 or 9 (survey one, 2019) to grades 11 or 12 (survey two, 2022). Notably, these students, studied over time, were part of a broader pooled sample of 5,825 students across the same eighteen highschools. The study window captured the year before and the year after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdown orders, functioning as an unprecedented stress test for theories of adolescent social, academic, and digital life and, importantly, as a benchmark to compare the effects of pandemic-related change and inequality to those effects from screen time alone.

Across four studies of adolescents, consisting of six cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, findings are not consistent with the displacement narrative, nor the broader concerns about the time youth spend on screens.

Findings are, however, consistent with something the current public and (most) academic discussions have largely overlooked or ignored: the gaps and inequalities that determine whether adolescents can access and use the internet meaningfully in the first place.

What the displacement hypothesis overlooks

Displacement and related research and policy concerning the time young people spend online assumes a “zero-sum” model of adolescent day-to-day time. An hour online is an hour not spent studying, reading, sleeping, or interacting face-to-face (i.e., time spent on more productive or developmentally “better” activity).

Indeed, this makes sense logically. However, as an empirical claim, this model requires time spent online to behave differently from all other ways adolescents allocate time; it must produce uniquely negative outcomes and be inherently harmful across digital contexts, rather than the typical mix of trade-offs corresponding to, and often overlooked among any other social or developmental context.

Yet, online time does not differ from other youth activity. Instead, I find it has a mix of pros, cons, and even some “uniquely digital” benefits which youth utilize for social and academic gains. When I compared unstructured digital media use against traditional face-to-face interaction and activities, both produced similar patterns: some negative associations with academic outcomes, some null, and some positive.

Trade-offs within traditional face-to-face activity (for example, social time with friends and family, or time spent in after-school extracurriculars) are treated as ordinary developmental experiences that must be experienced for the betterment of development. The identical trade-offs involving digital time tend to be overlooked or ignored, and online engagement is perceived as altogether harmful.

A growing body of evidence, including this dissertation, do not support that distinction. Indeed, the developmental context is routinely misread, leaving out the context of the experiences and time spent on digital, as well as face-to-face activities, interactions, existing inequalities, and changes inherent to development. As such, I proposed a novel framework to understand these contexts:

Digital capital exchange

Rather than treating screen time as a unified harm, this dissertation advances an “exchange”-based framework, grounded in James Coleman’s theories of youth capital and digital inequality scholarship, particularly following Eszter Hargittai, Jan van Dijk, and Alexander van Deursen (see this list of all dissertation references for full works).

The core proposition is that adolescents’ online engagement is not an alternative to developmental activity but another, albiet modern domain through which young people accumulate and mobilize online resources––particularly digital skills––that work alongside existing social networks and experiences to be exchanged for human capital (measured as: academic achievement, aspirations, STEM interest) and social capital (peer networks, community participation, extracurricular involvement).

Online time is not the mechanism; instead, it is digital skills that I find to be the most vital component in youth capital exchange and enhancement. Unstructured online engagement contributes to online skills; those skills, accumulated and mobilized alongside existing peer, family, and community networks, translate into the outcomes researchers and parents care about, i.e., academic achievement, aspirations, and face-to-face interaction and social networks.

This digital capital framework treats online and in-person contexts as complementary rather than antagonistic, and it situates adolescents’ digital lives within the structural conditions––connectivity quality, device reliability, autonomy of use––that determine whether exchange can occur at all.

Methods (in brief)

Paper-and-pencil surveys were administered to students in classrooms at two time-points: spring 2019 (N=2,876) and spring 2022 (N=2,949), across the same eighteen predominantly rural Michigan schools, grades 8–12. Official, nationally-ranked standardized reading, writing, and math test scores (PSAT 8/9, PSAT 10, SAT; College Board) were then anonymously linked to students’ survey responses with the help of participating districts.

Cross-sectional path analyses modeled pooled and wave-specific samples (pooled N=5,825); two-wave cross-lagged panel models tested reciprocal, longitudinal relationships on the 653 students who completed both surveys. Multi-group analyses of the cross-lagged panel models compared relationships between girls (N=345) and boys (N=308). All longitudinal models included time-invariant socioeconomic covariates as well as time-varying covariates to reduce omitted-variable bias.

Key findings: an overview

To summarize, to the best of my ability, eight chapters across 376 pages, I present two primary findings:

First: digital inequality predicted larger and more consistent declines in human capital than screen time did.

Unreliable home internet and technology maintenance problems––experiencing and/or dealing with broken or outdated devices and software, restrictive school-issued hardware, issues with connecting to or maintaining internet access––decreased youth GPA and standardized test achievement. And, these effect sizes were substantially larger than any negative direct effect from unstructured digital media use.

Across all four empirical studies, digital inequality emerged as the most substantial predictor of academic and developmental decline.

Second: digital skills mediated the relationship between online time and adolescent academic and social outcomes.

Unstructured digital media use, particularly online gaming and web browsing, predicted higher internet and social media skills for adolescents, which in turn predicted stronger academic achievement and self-efficacy (human capital), and social interaction and extracurricular participation (social capital). The positive indirect effect of screen time through skills offset or exceeded any small negative direct effects across several outcomes (supporting our existing peer-reviewed work: Hales & Hampton, 2025, and which you can read more about here).

These exchange processes were amplified when peer and family networks were modeled alongside digital skills, consistent with the premise that online and offline contexts operate together rather than in competition. The effect was not universal: social media skills amplified rather than offset a negative association with consistency of interest, one of the two subscales of grit. The exchange framework describes a contextual and conditional, domain-specific mechanism, not a blanket defense of time spent online.

Implications

If digital inequality, and not screen time, is the primary predictor of adolescent academic and developmental decline, and still warrants concern regarding access quality and experience even with the broader adoption of digital devices across the United States, the current policy emphasis on restriction is pointed at the wrong target. The evidence supports a different set of priorities.

Stable, reliable home (fast) broadband should be treated as an educational prerequisite rather than a consumer amenity. Unreliable connectivity exerted larger downward pressure on human capital than any measure of screen time, and that pressure intensified during the pandemic-era reliance on digital infrastructure. Technology maintenance, device repair, replacement, technical support, and the flexibility to install software and explore the web autonomously, matters as much as initial access, and school-issued devices that restrict autonomous use appear to hinder skill accumulation rather than support it.

Restrictive parental mediation of internet use was negatively associated with grit and self-efficacy at magnitudes comparable to the positive contributions of face-to-face activity. This challenges the assumption that digital restriction functions protectively. Instructive mediation, teaching adolescents to verify information, navigate platforms critically, and mobilize online resources toward meaningful ends, is the posture the data supports.

Finally, the technical skill-building that occurs through gaming, self-directed exploration, and deep web use is skill-building, not wasted time. Closing the persistent gender gap in these domains likely requires legitimizing technical play for girls, rather than restricting it for everyone.

None of the above is an argument that screen time is benign. It is an argument that screen time is the wrong focus, particularly when studied mostly in isolation. Context matters substantially, whether that is time spent on other activities during adolescence, the period of adolescence itself, digital inequality, resources gained from such online use, and how all such factors interact. The factor that predicts whether a given adolescent can convert online engagement into capital outcomes is structural: access, infrastructure, skills, and the autonomy to use them. These factors are distributed unevenly, and its uneven distribution, not hours logged, is what separates adolescents who thrive from those who fall behind.

The full dissertation is available through Michigan State University’s ProQuest archive, or see the embedded full-text PDF below. I’m happy to share papers, preprints, or the underlying framework with anyone interested and working in this area––don’t hesitate to reach out via my contact form. Thanks for reading.

Tags: auction digital divide incentive auction Lansing MSU public broadcasting spectrum WKAR

The FCC Spectrum Auction and the Future of Public Broadcasting: The Case at MSU and Greater Lansing