Radio is quite serious about its push to mandate FM radio receivers in all US cell phones. The idea, which could turn out to be part of a complex deal with the music industry on "performance rights" (paying artists to play their music on the radio), sounded tentative at first—both sides stressed to us that no deal had been reached, that these were only talks so far.

But when the National Association of Broadcasters takes the time to pen a 1,300-word blog post about the "facts" in favor of mandatory FM radio, it's clear that the idea has moved beyond the "idle speculation" stage.

Would Congress go along with such an idea? Who knows—stranger things have happened within the august halls of the Capitol—but it's already clear that the cell phone manufacturers hate the idea of a mandate. "The height of absurdity," said the Consumer Electronics Association last week. "Rather than adapt to the digital marketplace, NAB and RIAA act like buggy-whip industries that refuse to innovate and seek to impose penalties on those that do."

Both opponents and backers of the idea portray themselves as consumer advocates. CEA stresses the extra cost and possible battery life issue of an FM receiver, noting that some cell phones do have the feature and that consumers can buy one of those if they want. But NAB wonders why the cell phone makers are arguing "against this pro-consumer feature" with their "exaggeration, rhetoric and factual inaccuracies."

In fact, those who opposed a government FM mandate are probably suffering from a "simple case of anti-competitive behavior." That's because radios don't chew up cell phone data plans.

As one might expect, "factual" documents from intensely interested parties aren't always sources of useful information—and this is no exception. "A 2008 study from TNS found that 45 percent of mobile users in Latin America and Asia cite AM/FM radio as one of their top three reasons for purchasing a mobile phone," says NAB, which has little to do either with Americans or with the wisdom of a government mandate.

Still, the document makes clear that radio plans to play the "public safety" card as often as possible as the debate progresses. Rather impressively, the document manages to work Hurricane Katrina, the World Trade Center attacks, and kidnapped children into a single sentence—if you don't support mandatory FM radio in cell phones, the natural world/terrorists/kidnappers have already won.

Given the ubiquity of TV and radio in cars, homes, and businesses, Americans hardly seem far from emergency information, though cell phones can be extraordinarily useful in the sorts of disasters where the power goes out.

The NAB document does make an excellent point, which is that the cell phone industry has been absurdly slow at rolling out an emergency alert system of its own. Though the industry noted this week that such a system was coming "soon," the law requiring it was passed four years ago. In that time, approximately five gazillion text messages have been sent; the cell phone industry really needs four years to figure out a way to distribute brief information?

The NAB's Dennis Wharton stresses to Ars that there's still no deal, and that "NAB merely thought it was important to correct the misinformation campaign from the other side." But this is an issue that NAB has pushed separately from the performance rights issue; last year, it helped convince 60 Congresspeople to sign a letter (PDF) to the FCC and the Department of Homeland Security, asking them to explore an FM mandate out of concerns for safety.