I haven't thought of them in years, those bedraggled, starving Japanese soldiers who -- when I was growing up in the early 1960s -- were periodically discovered in jungle caves on remote Pacific islands, unaware that World War II had been over for decades.

But reading the petitions and complaints filed in the past month with the FCC by opponents of the proposed sale of WTVJ-NBC 6, that's exactly what they remind me of: feeble old souls still fighting a war that, for everybody else, ended years ago.

They don't seem to realize that the old three-channel television universe was swept away by cable and satellite. They don't seem to realize that television stations increasingly compete against not one another but the Internet. They don't seem to realize that South Florida is now populated not just by people named Smith and Jones but García and López -- or that the Garcias and Lopezes aren't refugees who just washed ashore on inner tubes, but bilingual Americans who've been living here three generations.

What called this ghost army to attention was the July announcement that NBC, WTVJ's corporate parent, planned to sell the station to the Washington Post Co., which already owns WPLG-ABC 10.

In many American cities, such a sale would be illegal on its face: FCC rules prohibit a single company from owning more than one of a metropolitan market's top four TV stations. Typically, that means that the stations affiliated with the top four English-language networks -- ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox -- must remain in different hands.

But in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale market, the soaring strength of Spanish-language networks Univisíon and Telemundo coupled with the ratings collapse of NBC's prime-time network lineup have combined to tumble WTVJ into sixth place. The Federal Trade Commission (which generally speaks for the Justice Department as well) has approved the deal; that means an FCC ruling, expected sometime after the first of the year, will be final.

That has kicked opponents of the deal -- a ragtag collection of WTVJ employees worried about layoffs, addled anti-corporate activists and cynical political opportunists -- into a frenzy of mis- and dis-information. Comments and petitions filed with the FCC objecting to the sale are riddled with errors, mischaracterizations and some statements that I don't know what else to call but flat-out lies.

• A group calling itself the Coalition of Concerned Citizens For Competition and Fairness in Broadcast Journalism, ramrodded by former NAACP official William McCormick and attorney J.B. Harris, accuses NBC and the Post Co. of ''selectively choosing rating periods'' to show WTVJ is in sixth place when it's really one of the top four stations. In fact, WTVJ has finished outside the top four -- sometimes as low as seventh -- in every Nielsen ratings sweep of the past six years.

• Identical letters signed by U.S. Reps. Kendrick Meek, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Robert Wexler and Ron Klein (our congressional delegation: a herd of independent minds) refer to the Post Co. as ''a major national network.'' The Post Co. isn't a network at all -- its stations don't broadcast the same programming -- and with only six stations, it's not even a major corporate player in television. Certainly not compared with some companies already operating in South Florida: CBS, which owns WFOR-CBS 4, has 29 stations. The Tribune Co., which owns WSFL-CW 39, has 25. If anything, swapping NBC for the Post Co. decreases corporate media influence in South Florida -- NBC currently owns 27 stations.

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