When Mitchell Szczepanczyk started talking about digital TV, people weren’t inclined to listen. At a local roundtable for left-leaning publishers in May of 2007 he warned that the conversion from analog to digital slated for early 2009 could be a disaster. But 2009 was a long way off, and “the issue seemed esoteric,” he remembers. The single-minded Szczepanczyk, with his buttoned-down, computer-programmer looks (his colleague Steve Macek calls him “somewhat nerdy”), registered as an oddball or zealot.
Szczepanczyk’s awakening as a media activist came while he was watching TV. It was 1992, and he’d just graduated from high school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he was raised by Polish-immigrant parents. “This TV show talked about two facts about the media that I’d never heard before,” he says. “One was increased concentration of ownership—fewer companies owning more and more media properties. And the second was that this was going to have a huge impact on what people see or don’t see and how points of view are presented or dismissed or ignored. That was the biggest revelation of my life.”
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That hearing also marked Szczepanczyk’s national TV debut—as a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. A game-show fanatic (he hopes to write a book about the 1950s quiz show scandals), Szczepanczyk played Quiz Bowl extensively at the University of Michigan, and he occasionally writes and edits trivia questions for National Academic Quiz Tournaments. He trained extensively for Millionaire, going so far as to donate blood as an exercise in conquering his fears. He passed the $8,000 level on the show, but at the cost of all his lifelines, and when he got a question he couldn’t answer about the ABC drama Brothers and Sisters he walked away with his winnings. The day the show aired he was at the FCC hearing in Chicago testifying against big media. “‘Today, I made my national television debut’—those were the first words I said before the FCC,” Szczepanczyk says.
Another rising concern has been with users who get their boxes and still can’t watch TV. Digital signals are easily interfered with—by such things as trees, mountains, and tall buildings—and viewers who have hooked their converter boxes to indoor antennae, especially in rural and outlying areas, have reported patches of digital distortion (think scratched DVDs), or even a total loss of the picture (an abrupt shift from excellent to nonexistent reception known as the “digital cliff”). Hawaii, which made the switch on January 15, is a place where digital reception turned out to be particularly tricky (“Apparently the digital signal does not bend well in our valleys and canyons,” reads an e-mail posted at dtvreadalert.org), but problems have been reported just about everywhere—from Manhattan to Las Vegas to Salem, Oregon. Many TV viewers are now being directed to purchase expensive outdoor antennae.
Just about no one monitoring the DTV conversion expected it to go smoothly, but many observers were ready to get on with it and live with the turmoil while it lasted. Last month’s delay triggered an onslaught of exasperated comments on the Web. “This country has had at least a year to prepare for this and as usual there are crybabies that hold out till the last minute and then they whine and whine because they’re not ready. Screw them!” said a poster at adweek.com. “The bottom line is that this is never going to go down without people being left out in the lurch,” said another. “They should have just pulled the trigger on it this month and got it over with.” The Sun-Times ran an op-ed by James Lakely, managing editor of the Heartland Institute’s Infotech & Telecom News, who said, “Proponents of delay seem to operate under the fantasy that the switch can take place without a single little old lady missing a minute of Oprah.”
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