An issue to keep an eye on:
<a href="http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/1/koerner-b-2.html" target="_blank">Onward, Christian Moghuls</a>
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As he begins his 25th year in Christian broadcasting, Coonce must be especially thankful for the Lord's business smarts. After years of scraping by on goodwill offerings and souvenir sales, his nonprofit, commercial-free network just hit the corporate-welfare jackpot. This coming June 19, Tri-State Christian TV and Radiant Life Ministries--Coonce's two main evangelical concerns--will join at least 20 other broadcast companies in auctioning off a portion of their electromagnetic spectrum, the invisible commodity that carries broadcast signals. The spectrum to be sold was given gratis to Coonce and hundreds of other broadcasters in 1996--a slab of political pork that Arizona Senator John McCain calls "one of the greatest scams in American history." Now, thanks to the largesse of the Federal Communications Commission, small-fry religious broadcasters like Coonce stand to become tycoons literally overnight. "I'm sure they're seeing this as manna from heaven," says Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). "Except instead of coming via God, it's coming via the FCC."
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01-06-2002, 12:54 PM
Religious Broadcasters about to get big windfall
