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Posted on 01/21/2005 9:38:10 AM PST by Military family member
Powell to step down as chairman of FCC, officials say
By STEPHEN LABATON and JOHN O’NEIL
WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 - Michael K. Powell will step down today as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, officials there said, ending a four-year term that was marked by the tightening of standards on decency and attempts to loosen restrictions on media ownership. ADVERTISEMENT
Mr. Powell was appointed to the commission in 1997 by President Bill Clinton and promoted to chairman by President Bush in 2001. Associates of Mr. Powell’s have reported for months that he planned to leave after the conclusion of Mr. Bush’s first term. His decision to announce his retirement today was reported this morning in an editorial in The Wall Street Journal.
The replacements being considered for Mr. Powell are said by administration officials to include another Republican member of the commission, Kevin Martin; Becky Klein, a former head of the public utility commission in Texas; Patrick Wood III, the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission; and Michael Gallagher, head of the National Telecommunications and Information Adminstration in the Commerce Department.
It was not clear when Mr. Powell would actually leave his post.
Mr. Powell, a Republican, brought an emphasis on deregulation to the commission. The most contentious issue of his term came with his proposal to relax the rules limiting how many media outlets one company could own in any given city.
The change was supported by big broadcasting and publishing companies and vigorously opposed by a coalition of smaller broadcasters and labor, consumer and civil rights organizations. It passed in June 2003 along a party-line vote, but was blocked last year by a court that said the commission had failed to justify the ruling.
Among the broader public, Mr. Powell was better known for the crackdown on indecency on the airwaves that he led after the Super Bowl incident in which singer Janet Jackson bared a breast on live television in 2004.
The fines that followed were something of a departure from Mr. Powell’s reputation when he took over as chairman, when he was hailed by broadcasters for his position that it was unfair to impose standards on them that their competitors in cable and satellite television did not face.
Mr. Powell said the fines were made necessary by an “increasing coarseness” in programming driven by a quest for ratings, while the broadcasting community called him the most heavy-handed enforcer of speech restrictions in decades.
Mr. Powell faced criticism from conservatives as well for not being even tougher, including from another Republican member of the commission, Kevin J. Martin.
Mr. Martin was also behind a rare defeat for Mr. Powell, when the commission turned down his proposal in 2003 to deregulate the local telephone market.
Mr. Powell, 41, is the son of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who is also stepping down from his post. The younger Mr. Powell followed his father’s footsteps by joining the Army, but went to law school after being severely injured in a jeep accident in Germany.
PING
Indeed the response of the Flight 94 passengers to the telephoned relaying of broadcast journalism about the destruction of the WTC towers is the only example, I submit, of any broadcast other than traffic and weather reports conveying actionable intelligence with a historic effect.
Broadcasting is not merely radio transmission, but censorship as well - censorship of nearly all of us so that CBS can "inform" us "objectively." That however turns the First Amendment on its head, giving us no right to "speak but only a right to listen and a duty to shut up.
The truth is that the FCC's mission of informing the masses is unconstitutional because it puts the government in the business of deciding who gets what is essentially a title of nobility - the presumption that what FCC licensees say is true and important. I do not say that the advantage in propaganda power enjoyed by The New York Times is ill-gotten; newspapers have no legal protection from competition. The case is otherwise with the broadcasters - and they abuse their priviledge shamelessly.
They do so every time they project the winner of a state, not merely before the polls are all closed in that state as in FL 2000, but whenever they project a winner of any state before the polls are closed everywhere.
Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate
I must admit that the concept of the FCC affecting a form of censorship interesting and powerful. I believe the FCC (perhaps in theory only) exists primarily to prevent individual stations from blocking the transmissions of other stations. With a limited spectrum from which to pull frequencies, opening it up to anyone who wants to put up a tower and transmitter would destroy the entire broadcast industry in mere days, leaving only the biggest and most powerful stations running everything.
Furthermore, most networks and broadcasters would almost immediately eliminate their news divisions, which for the most part, result in high costs with little return.
What little protection the FCC offers in terms of decency and content would also be eliminated, allowing more porn, and fewer family oriented programming.
The biggest proof I have for that argument is the internet which operates without such restraint, and where porn sites outnumber all other forms of content by a wide margin. Clearly, this is what the market wants and supports, or else why would such a disparity of numbers exist? Is there another answer? I don't know.
Broadcasters, despite the complaints of most of the population, operate under extremely tight rules and regulations. What appears on any broadcast station or network on any given night is a lot more controlled than what I can publish in my paper each month. I am controlled more by the markets. While including a Page 3 girl each month might work for a London Tabloid, it would never work here in the midwest.
Ham Ping?
I think the issue is addresses. If we have freedom of the press (and I include the internet but exclude broadcasting from my definition of "press"), the issue is the quality of the address we are able to obtain or build.Your newspaper has an address in the sense of the places and times it is normally displayed for sale (if any) and it has an address for subscriptions. All are supported by your banner you emblazon at the top of the front page, and any other easily recognized formatting to which you have accustomed your readers. FR obviously has an address - its URL. Part of FR's address is, unfortunately, the requirement for the reader to have a computer with an internet connection. The address of a TV station includes the need for a TV and (in many cases) a cable connection, and the address of a radio station is a radio and a number to dial in. TVs have a channel number to select.
I say that the government has no business giving great addresses to the few, disadvantaging you and me in our efforts to attract attention to our ideas and beliefs.
Well it's about time he got a real job that Daddy didn't get for him. Now that Daddy retired, he doesn't have that name to ride on any longer. Maybe he'll have to look for a job on his own.
Yep. I wonder if the next FCC comissioner will be as enthusiastic a supporter of BPL as Powell?
Thanks for the ping!
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Good question. What will the new FCC chairman (whoever it turns out to be) think about BPL? What will the new chairman's attitude be toward amateur radio?
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