You need to read this to understand McCain's FCC letter in context:
WSJ:
January 7, 2000
The McCain 'Scandal'
Fortuitously, a little-known squabble over a Pittsburgh television station has become part of the Presidential campaign. In keeping with the conventions of political journalism, the story has been: John McCain runs against "special interests;" John McCain carries water for special interests. Ipso facto, Mr. McCain is a hypocrite.
The real scandal, however, is not the sway special interests have over Washington. It's the sway Washington has over the private activities of everybody else. Bud Paxson, the television entrepreneur, does not shovel donations at candidates or let them rent his planes at giveaway rates for fun. As Mr. Paxson told the New York Times, "I'm a political person. Why? Because I happen to be in a business that politics is very heavily involved in."
Yes, Mr. Paxson and his associates did favors for Mr. McCain, and Mr. McCain twice wrote to the FCC urging a yea or nay on a pending swap of Pittsburgh TV licenses. But the accounts you've been reading of this transaction do not tell the whole story.
The deal had been languishing not two years but four, and the party really on the hook was Pittsburgh's premier public broadcasting outlet, WQED. It had first agreed to sell the license for its underutilized sister station, WQEX, back in 1996, at a time when the parent station was sinking under $14 million in debt. And it wasn't Mr. McCain urging prompt action in those days, but the U.S. Congress, in an FY 96 spending measure that required the FCC to rule on the transfer in 30 days.
For reasons the FCC is not obliged to spell out, the original deal was rejected. Now, we might have questions about a nonprofit PBS affiliate's profiting from the sale of a public license, but such things had been done before, and for big money. In trying to discern the real special interest in this case, moreover, we can't help but notice who was opposing the transaction.
Various groups under the names Alliance for Progressive Action, Save Pittsburgh Public Television, the QED Accountability Project and Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting led the fight against the license sale, all of them organized by the same West Virginia sociology professor, Jerry Starr. But before anyone had heard of these groups or their public campaign, Mr. Starr was a founding board member of another organization, the nonprofit Public Educational TV Corp., which was seeking the WQEX license gratis from the FCC for itself. Mr. Starr and friends argued that WQED was a "licensee of bad character" because of its red ink. Never mind that the red ink was why WQED was looking to sell the license in the first place.
It gets more curious still. Mr. Starr's partners in this endeavor included Pittsburgh City Council President Jim Ferlo, state Representative Allen Kukovich, and Rosemary Trump, head of the Service Employees International Union, Local 585. All were founding board members of the company seeking the potentially lucrative license, and their lawyers kept a friendly FCC flooded with legal excuses to drag its feet.
Twice the Dec. 31 drop-dead date in the original Paxson sale had to be rolled over. The struggling WQED faced a $7.5 million kill fee. Supporting the license transfer to Paxson were a congeries of local universities, foundation groups and corporations that had long funded public broadcasting in Pittsburgh. But it was Mellon Bank, holding a $10 million note on the near-insolvent WQED, that foresaw trouble at the FCC and shrewdly insisted the station have a plan B.
This is the arrangement that has now come into the Presidential campaign, obliquely and inadequately explained, thanks to Wednesday's Boston Globe story, and even more thanks to FCC Chairman William Kennard's decision to treat a perfectly routine query from Senator McCain as some kind of sinister intrusion into the purity of the FCC's decision making.
Plan B was a complex deal to transfer the public broadcasting license to a local nonprofit religious broadcaster, Cornerstone Television. In turn, Cornerstone would sell its existing station to Paxson, splitting the money with WQED. The Clintonite wing of the FCC had no good reason for not approving the transaction. Congress had already implicitly endorsed a license sale to help WQED escape its debts and raise money for new programming. At this late date, enter Mr. McCain, saying that after four years it was time to get the transfer over and done.
If Senator McCain has a problem, it's not with his FCC intervention, but with his campaign finance proposals. They would give more power to the Federal Elections Commission to do with political campaigns what the FCC does with broadcasting licenses. The Senator actually canceled a Palm Beach fund-raiser with a Paxson family member, saying he did nothing wrong but mumbling about an "appearance problem." The fact is that one way or another political money will continue to flow so long as Washington has the power to do so many things to so many people in so many ways.
The real WQED scandal is that Uncle Sam is spending billions of dollars to give unelected bureaucrats power over large swaths of the private economy, inhibiting honest commerce and opening the door for political shakedowns. Somebody has to serve as the public's ombudsman and ensure that the private sector doesn't permanently grind to a halt under the onslaught. If the government is to give bureaucrats such power, the least our elected representatives can do is ride herd on them. Maybe somebody should make that a campaign issue.
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