And cable providers must reserve a substantial number of channels for public and leased access programming. Digital broadcasting is a new opportunity to ask not what TV has done to our country but to ask what TV can do for our country. No patterns or practices are set. This is the right time, and digital broadcasting could be the right place, to stake out a claim for free and fair political debate. But we should doubt that the marketplace will give us free time.
Candidates give broadcasters hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for their advertising time.
They will continue to do so. Suppose we asked for five percent of the programming time for a digital TV licensee to be devoted to educational TV and political debate. This is a very substantial number. With far, far less than that amount, we could make the biannual impossibility of campaign reform into an inevitable improvement of 21st century democracy. That is only about 2 percent of a licensee's time.