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McAdams On: More Fun With Numbers
5/6/2011
BEMUSED, CALIF.: One learns very early in journalism school (yes,
there were once such things) that numbers are imperative to a story. Prices
give perspective. For example, had a certain mayor of Los Angeles limited his graft
to a $12 ticket for “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,” rather than $21,000
for the Oscars . . . well, you do the math.
Aha! But you won’t, will you? Because there would be no such thing as
journalism school if we were all a little better at math. Nooo. We would be
designing IC schematics for devices that facilitate complete social isolation
in return for astounding sums of money. (Another rule of journalism is to illustrate
the significance of an amount. E.g., an “astounding” sum of money is a lot more
than you make now.)
Journalists are not particularly known for their prowess with numbers. Once upon
a time, they were paired with creatures known as “copy editors.” Copy editors
died out en masse during the Great Media Consolidation of the ’90s. The few
that remain are mostly at small-town newspapers, attempting to avoid the
stylistic, factual, grammatical and spelling horror that is the Internet.
Neither is Washington, D.C. a hotbed of people who are sticklers for accurate
details, i.e., copy editors. It is a hotbed of attorneys. Attorneys are people
who could afford to go on to law school. Law schools are places where the mathematically
disinclined go to make astounding sums of money with the crafty use of just words!!! (If you are in journalism
school right now, please write that down where you will not forget it.)
Now, attorneys believe they are smarter than you. They may not be, but that
doesn’t matter. Your Nobel Prize in physics is meaningless in the perceptual
world of attorneys, because they are the original practitioners of “The Secret.”
They visualize their smartness and so they are. Violà! They know, for example, that if they toss numbers around
like confetti, you are not going to pick up a pencil.
And so it is with our friends in Washington who are agitating, nay,
evangelizing--nay, an even more emphatic word--for the reassignment of TV
broadcast spectrum for broadband. The folks at the Consumer Electronics
Association, whose members stand to make a quadrillion dollars from the
reassignment, launched a “Spectrum Crunch Clock” this week “to help Americans
visualize the economic costs of delay in spectrum reform.” (Note: A quadrillion is a lot. “Visualization”
denotes attorneys applying “The Secret.”)
The “clock” is actually a large red-letter graphic depicting an ever-increasing
sum of money. This sum is allegedly how much money is being wasted because “intense
lobbying by broadcast television stations has stalled progress on this vital
program.” Except for broadcasters haven’t stalled squat. The process is pretty
much in line with the agenda
put forth by the Federal Communications Commission in April of 2010.
Broadcasters did manage to get an
extra seven whole days to comment on the spectrum reassignment docket, because
the original period closed the Monday after the National Association of
Broadcasters Show in Las Vegas. If seven days is all they got as a result of “intense
lobbying,” someone’s not spending enough on cigars.
But again, we are working with attorney math, and not copy-editor math, which
is how the CEA determined that this delay is costing the country $14,444 a
minute. Because if you take the $33 billion number made up by other attorneys to
express the value of the sought-after broadcast spectrum, and you divide it
with pie,
carry the fore and multiply it all by magic ponies, you get $14,444 a
minute. But you don’t know, do you?
Neither does the CEA, dog bless ‘em. Because the Spectrum Crunch Clock read $33,172,494,881
yesterday. Today, it says $8.4 billion
and change, or roughly the payroll of 2,208 broadcast TV stations and networks
according to the 2007
Economic Census, which also indicates nearly $36 billion in receipts for
the survey period. Using the institutionally approved mathematics of
Washington, D.C., that means stripping spectrum away from broadcasters will
cost the country $3 billion.
Stayed tuned to McAdams On for more fun with numbers. Because I’m sure there
will be.
~ Deborah D. McAdams
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