Subject: [NEXTEL-1] F.C.C. Chief Talks of Frustration and Surprise

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 01:56:16 -0400

F.C.C. Chief Talks of Frustration and Surprise

By STEPHEN LABATON

September 22, 2003

WASHINGTON, Sept. 21, 2003

With a hurricane bearing down on the nation's capital late last week, Michael K.
Powell, the embattled chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, was in an
expansive mood about the political storm that has engulfed him in recent months.

In a wide-ranging telephone interview Thursday from his home in Northern Virginia,
Mr. Powell mused inconclusively about how much longer he would be at the agency.
Alternately frustrated, assertive and resigned, he acknowledged the sharp
political skills of opponents who have waged a campaign to derail the new media
ownership rules, which have become the most important regulations of Mr. Powell's
tenure. But he also sounded surprised that he had become a focal point of the
debate.

"Basically, people ran an outside political campaign against the commission," he
said. "I've never seen that in six years." Mr. Powell was an F.C.C. commissioner
for three years before President Bush appointed him chairman in 2001. 

"I've been called every name in the book by every opponent in the book," he said.
"That's classic Washington. If you can't get past jingoism, you attack the person.
I wish the press would focus on more than who's rebuked and who's rebuking and
look at what the best alternatives are for the public in terms of policy."

The new rules, adopted 3 to 2 by the commission in June, would permit a company to
own both a newspaper and a broadcast station in many of the nation's metropolitan
areas, and would permit companies to own as many as three television stations and
eight radio stations in the largest markets, while limiting further consolidation
in the radio industry. 

Asked about accusations by some that he had failed to build enough public support
for the rules before adopting them, Mr. Powell replied: "I've heard that
represented as my failure. I'll take that as my responsibility. But there was a
concerted grass-roots effort to attack the commission from the outside in."

Earlier last week, Mr. Powell suffered two in a recent string of setbacks. The
Republican-controlled Senate defied the White House on Tuesday and voted to repeal
the new rules. And on Monday a federal appeals court in Philadelphia, which had
recently issued a surprise order blocking the rules, rejected an F.C.C. request to
transfer the case to Washington, where experts say the agency's legal claims might
get a more friendly reception.

Mr. Powell said his opponents distorted the facts and misrepresented his views.
And he said that he had been thinking recently about how much longer he might
remain at the commission, but seemed to reach no conclusions.

"I've gone through various moments about wanting to leave," he said. "I have a kid
who is starting high school who was 6 when I started this. I've been in public
service for 20 years. People see this bruising summer and say, `Oh, he must be
going.' "

"It's not always fun," he said. "It's not necessarily that much longer. There is
an election ahead." 

"I have a tired family, tired children and a tired spouse. Candidly, I once said I
would be in this job for three years and then leave," he said. "That was three
years ago."

And yet he talked of work still to be done. In the last year, he said, he had been
forced to handle issues left by others even though he had long preferred to tackle
different matters, like broadband and wireless regulation. He said that he now
hoped to turn to those subjects, which could take time. And he said his recent
hiring of new top aides demonstrated that he might not be leaving soon.

"There is no urgency in terms of quitting and going into the private sector," he
said. "It will be there when I am ready."

By many accounts, Mr. Powell and his allies miscalculated the political uproar
that the media ownership rules would provoke and the public's deep distrust of
large media companies. A cautious regulator who never viewed his role as fighting
in the political arena, Mr. Powell waited until after he announced the rules
before trying to marshal public support for them. By then, the opposition had
coalesced — and it included a formidable array of industry groups and other
organizations. 

The smaller broadcasters, who have considerable influence because they are in
every Congressional district and control most of the television and radio outlets
that are vital to political life, came out loudly against the rule permitting the
networks to buy more stations. 

And a significant number of religious, consumer, labor and civil rights groups
rallied against many of the other rules. Organizations like the National Rifle
Association and the Parents Television Council joined in one of the oddest
ideological alliances in years and flooded lawmakers and regulators with millions
of complaints.

"There has been a huge problem with the political lopsidedness of the debate," Mr.
Powell said. "People in the opposition are part of a highly vocal and strenuous
community. They have relatively strong viewpoints, are very active and mobile."

"On the other side, if you are in a fraternity watching TV and drinking beer and
happy, what are you going to do to get in the debate?" he asked. "You are not. I
think the public is more upset with the media than they are with the rules."

He acknowledged that as a matter of principle, he had deliberately avoided doing
any political spadework in advance of the new rules, even as his critics assembled
the coalition against them.

"Michael Copps went out into the country six months before we did anything, and I
credit him," Mr. Powell said, referring to the Democratic commissioner who has led
the opposition to the rules. "Our job started on June 3," the day after the
commission approved the rules.

He said that while some lawmakers opposed the new rules on principle, others —
whom he refused to identify for publication — did so to settle old scores. These
lawmakers, he said, simply wanted to take revenge against media companies that
support the new rules but that had been critical of the lawmakers. 

Even Mr. Powell's friends say that his reluctance to engage in Washington politics
and his willingness to defy groups like the National Association of Broadcasters
may have been among his biggest errors. 

In terms of the specifics of the rule changes he helped devise, many industry
experts agree with Mr. Powell that there is little practical difference between
the old rule that limited the networks to owning stations reaching no more than 35
percent of the nation's households, and the new rule, that raises the cap to 45
percent. Indeed, two of the networks, CBS and Fox, now operate stations reaching
about 40 percent of households. Yet Mr. Powell's decision to seek the increase
provoked the smaller broadcasters to play a major role in the opposition.

In an effort to distinguish himself from his most recent Democratic predecessors,
William E. Kennard and Reed E. Hundt, Mr. Powell has insisted throughout his
tenure that his job as chairman of an independent agency is more like that of a
judge and that it is not his place to engage in the politics that can move
Washington.

That, in the view of many, has been a mistaken notion. "He came into office with
the best opportunity an F.C.C. chairman ever had, and he has squandered it," said
a friend and former top official at the commission. "He spent the first two years
talking vaguely deregulatory rhetoric. And then, when he started to do things this
year, he never used the bully pulpit. It was a combination of stubbornness and
unwillingness to fight, and I think he fundamentally misperceived the job."

Mr. Hundt, an outspoken critic, said that one of Mr. Powell's flaws was his
failure to respond to public outrage, including more than one million comments
that people have sent to the agency and to the offices of lawmakers criticizing
the new rules.

"It leaps out that Chairman Powell is disrespectful of public sentiment," Mr.
Hundt said.

Mr. Powell said that he believed that many of the comments flooding lawmakers and
the commission were mass-produced by a handful of groups, like the National Rifle
Association, which are less interested in the policy merits of the debate than in
using the controversy for their own fund-raising purposes. 

Current and former F.C.C. officials and some members of Congress, whether
supporters or critics, said that from the outset of his tenure, Mr. Powell, a
lawyer and former Army platoon leader, decided that he would not try to play a
political role because he saw himself as above the fray. He was absorbed in
theoretical policy arguments and the effort to marshal three votes from a
fractured commission, they said, ignoring the political realities of Washington.

"The saying about him is he can talk about nuclear physics, but he can't count to
three," said another former top official who remains friendly with Mr. Powell.
"This is like the story of a guy who is a great high school ballplayer, comes to
the majors and then can't hit a curve ball. You expect him to hit .380, and then
he hits .150."

To many in Washington, the events of recent months represent a remarkable
turnaround for Mr. Powell.

When President Bush, in his first week in the White House, selected Mr. Powell to
lead the Federal Communications Commission, he appeared on paper to be the
regulator best suited to meet the deregulatory goals of the young administration.

He had the charm, smarts and experience (his résumé includes serving as a top aide
to the former Justice Department antitrust chief Joel I. Klein). He had the
political connections (his close allies included top Republican committee
chairmen, John McCain in the Senate and Billy Tauzin in the House). And he had a
golden pedigree (as the son of Colin L. Powell, the former general whom Mr. Bush's
appointed secretary of state) that was thought to insulate him from low-level
political attacks. 

Nearly three years later, the younger Mr. Powell finds himself in a political
maelstrom the likes of which the F.C.C. has rarely seen. 

In recent months, he has lost a number of senior advisers, including his chief of
staff and top adviser on media regulations. Some who have left have complained
privately that their political advice was ignored and that they never had the
authority to strike the political deals that could have averted some of the
subsequent problems. 

Nor do the prospects look brighter for broad consensus at the increasingly divided
agency. As the commission turns its attention to difficult questions about how to
regulate the high-speed Internet market, or broadband, Mr. Powell is again facing
a highly fractured commission and a coalition of groups that could create
additional political problems for him.

Mr. Powell took special exception to the view advanced by senators, including
Byron L. Dorgan, the North Dakota Democrat and sponsor of the resolution of
disapproval, that he caved quickly and thoroughly to the special interests.

"I've been in public service for 20 years," Mr. Powell said. "I've been at the
F.C.C. for six. What do I gain from being in the pocket of anyone?"

He said he actually had little room to maneuver. Congress had ordered him to
revisit the media rules every two years, the courts had questioned the old ones in
a series of decisions, and it was exceedingly difficult to find three votes for
anything at the agency.

"We didn't initiate this as a deregulatory plank of an agenda, which is the way it
is portrayed," he said. "Trust me. Every chairman knows you don't want to tinker
with the media. It's the third rail."

"I cringe a little when I read that I am the architect," he said. "This was not my
deregulatory plan. This was a duty, and that's all I ever considered it. For me, I
do not personalize it and am not particularly bowed by the controversy. I am
frustrated by it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/22/business/media/22MIKE.html?pagewanted=print&position=

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