Timothy Wirth: Oral and Video Collection Interview

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• published: 12 Jun 2013
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MAXWELL Hello. I'm here with Senator Timothy Wirth. This oral video history is made possible by The Hauser Foundation Oral Video History Project of The Cable Center's Oral History Program. Tim, I want to start back when we first met back in the campaign in '72, I think it was. WIRTH '74. MAXWELL '74, sorry, and I want to talk about how you first got involved with the cable television industry. This is going to be a very cable-centric conversation, of course. So, it was up in Boulder, I think. Do you remember that? WIRTH Well, I'd say my first engagement in all of this came when I had just gotten elected in 1974 and a friend of mine whose name was Douglas Kater, who worked for Lyndon Johnson, had told me that what I ought to do is get on the Communications Sub-Committee in the House of Representatives and I had joined the Commerce Committee. I didn't know what the Communications Sub-Committee was, but there was nobody else joining it. Torbin McDonald was the Chair and they had one other member, Lionel Van Deerlin from California and there was nobody else on the Communications Sub-Committee, so this looked like an interesting thing, there wasn't anybody around. I thought the issues of communications, when I joined the Sub-Committee, were first amendment issues. I thought that's what we were talking about, so I hired a guy named Robert Sachs, who's now the head of NCTA, who had worked on the Daniel Ellsberg papers as a civil liberties guy and a first amendment guy. I hired Robert Sachs to come and help me with these communication issues that were all going to be first amendment issues. Well, we got on the committee and within about five minutes we figured out very quickly that this was not a set of 1st Amendment issues, but this was a set of issues related to carving up the pie, that that Sub-Committee had jurisdiction over how frequencies were effectively, not allocated, that was done by the FCC, but was the framework of law under which the FCC did it. It was the Sub-Committee that oversaw what the FCC did in terms of administering the Communications Act of 1934 in defining the public interest convenience and necessity. You know, what was the public interest standard, who was defining the public interest standard, that was being done by the FCC, but it was the Sub-Committee that really oversaw what was going on. Having figured that out, I then met a lot of people like you. I went to the CU center; they had some communications people there. There was a guy, a famous guy, at DU who was very involved in communications, who was one of the gurus of the country and I went to AT&T;, to Bell Labs, to try to figure out what was going on, had a tutorial there and of course the system was the solution, was the thing that they were saying. You know, that's have a monopoly. More: http://cablecenter.org/barco-library-hauser-oral-history/item/wirth-timothy.html