Must-carry, but through the back door.(Top of the Week)

The National Association of Broadcasters and the Association for Maximum Service Television have cooked up a complicated plan that would give a station the power to force a local cable system to carry either the old analog signal or the new digital one but not both.

That's the theory, anyway.

Under current rules, stations can invoke must-carry for only the analog signal. But under the new plan, stations choosing the digital option would have so much leverage over carriage terms that most cable operators would probably be resigned to carrying two versions of a broadcaster's signal.

The plan would require operators to make sure all their digital-tier …