September 22,
2003
By STEPHEN
LABATON
WASHINGTON,
Sept. 21 - 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 resume 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?ex=1065237220&ei=1&en=41767f8e4b2d1cd3
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