• Most disturbingly, both the congressmen and the Coalition of Concerned Citizens argue that Spanish-language stations simply don't count as real television. The coalition's petition to block the sale says flatly that Spanish stations shouldn't be included when calculating South Florida's biggest four stations because Spanish-language TV is ''a totally separate and discrete market.'' The congressmen make it clear they feel the same way, though they condescendingly allow that ``some bilingual Floridians might consume both both English- and Spanish-speaking stations.''

The congressmen must be spending too much time in Washington -- ''some'' doesn't begin to quantify the numbers of bilingual television viewers in South Florida. According to Nielsen researchers, about 41 percent of the Miami-Fort Lauderdale television audience identifies itself as Hispanic. Only about one-eighth of that group speaks only Spanish; almost all the rest use a blend of the two languages.

And they move back and forth between Spanish and English TV. The polling company Scarborough Media reports that 67 percent of the Hispanic audience watches Spanish television, and 61 percent English television.

''It's very clear that people cruise around when it comes to television,'' says Marilyn Hansen, who's worked both sides of the market as a general sales manager, first at English-language WSFL, later at the Spanish-language Univisíon network. ``There's a very small universe of people who watch only Spanish television. The rest of the population is watching a telenovela one night, Grey's Anatomy the next, depending on what they feel like.''

Just as they're living in a long-ago South Florida where Hispanics stuck to Little Havana and Carmen Miranda movies, opponents of the WTVJ sale imagine a media landscape where tonight's television choices would be restricted to Bonanza, The Jack Benny Show and Bus Stop. Their complaints to the FCC are riddled with predictions of doom for ''programming diversity'' and ``editorial voices.''

News flash: South Florida has 17 television stations owned by 14 companies, and those numbers will remain the same even if the sale goes through: Instead of NBC owning two stations (WTVJ and WSCV-Telemundo 51) and the Post Co. one, it will be the reverse. If for some insanely self-destructive reason the Post Co. were to trash its own $350 million investment in WTVJ, there would be plenty of options left for television viewers.

A Post Co. that owned both WPLG and WTVJ might decide to cut back on news coverage, the Coalition of Concerned Citizens warns, and ''simply simulcast one local newscast on both of its stations.'' That's certainly possible; the NBC and ABC affiliates in Jacksonville, owned by media giant Gannett, use one news show on both stations.

But equally likely, if the coalition succeeds in blocking the sale to the Post Co., is that WTVJ gets out of the news business altogether, as has happened recently in St. Louis and Detroit. If WTVJ can't be sold to a company that can save money by combining operations with another station it already owns in the market, it will most likely go to one of the private equity firms that are doing most of the buying these days. They make their money by aggressively cutting costs to improve balance sheets, then reselling the station for a quick profit. And one of the most likely targets for a budgeteer's machete at WTVJ is the news department, which has been hemorrhaging viewers for the past six years. The station's 11 p.m. newscast has lost a whopping 65 percent of them; other news shows rank as low as eighth in their time slot.

That's the real bottom line on WTVJ -- it's being pressed hard in a media environment where consumers have a million and one options. Back in the old three-channel days, local stations practically printed their own money. It took a bona fide idiot to lose money.

But that's no longer the case. With 90 percent of the audience getting its television from either cable or satellite, the average family has 120 channels to choose from. The Internet is expanding that number literally by the day as viewing options sprout from computers, cellphones, even video-game consoles.

''The Internet is coming at us from all directions,'' says Dave Boylan, WPLG's general manager. ''It's largely a giant TV station now. If you missed an ABC show last week, you can go on the Internet and watch it. If you missed Katie Couric's interview with Sarah Palin or Jon Stewart's funny joke about it, you can go on the Internet and watch it.'' What the opponents of the WTVJ sale are really asking the FCC to do is to turn back time. As those Japanese soldiers in the Pacific could have told them, it won't work.

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