Spectrum Lords.

In late March, when the National Association of Broadcasters held its annual Futures Summit in Pebble Beach, California, the assembled pack of Wall Street financial-analyst invitees presented the broadcasters with an astonishing but presumably welcome fact: Recent auctions in Europe and the United States indicated that the market value of the spectrum space--the airwaves over which television and radio are broadcast--that the license holders currently occupy could be as much as $367 billion. (To put that in perspective, the entire local broadcasting industry itself is worth only ...