check this out, man is JJ going to get pissed now. can you believe another black
working with GW. will the world come to an end? just maybe the screws on hollywood are beginning to turn.
god this is going to be a fun 8 yrs...
Bush Eyes Another Powell, This Time for the
FCC
Michael Powell, Colin's son, is first in line to be the next
chairman of the commission. Media big shots won't be
disappointed.
by Erik Wemple
Wednesday, December 20, 2000 04:07 p.m.
WASHINGTON -- Federal Communications Commission chairman
William Kennard couldn't have predicted that his decision to visit a
Navajo reservation last April with President Clinton would stir trouble
with the man who will likely replace him.
But there was Republican commissioner Michael Powell, ready with a
stinging rebuke one day after Clinton and Kennard joined hands to
proclaim a federal program to provide affordable phone service to
Native Americans. Angered by the ''unabashed politicization of
commission business,'' Powell slammed Kennard for allowing the
program to be passed along as Clinton's intellectual property.
''Contrary to the impression engineered that this initiative is a new
and dramatic proposal by the administration, this initiative is in fact a
commission item that was formally initiated in August of last year,''
wrote Powell in a press release. Other sources of outrage included the
deployment of ''the commission's professional staff in such an
endeavor'' -- an outing that Powell felt compromised the
''independence and integrity'' of the agency.
Powell's outburst could be interpreted as a
partisan jab at the Democratic-controlled
commission or perhaps a salvo phrased for
the delight of a Republican Congress
determined to uproot the free market
interventionists at federal regulatory
agencies. More likely, though, the
commissioner's statement reflects exactly
who Powell is: an officious,
boundary-conscious bureaucrat of moderate
Republican leanings.
Powell's posture on all kinds of FCC business
-- the digital TV fiasco, open access to
cable lines and cable rates, to name a few
-- assumes an air of urgency with the ascension of George W. Bush
to the presidency on Jan. 20. The 35-year-old one-term commissioner
is all but certain to take Kennard's seat as chairman, a job known in
outmoded language as the ''traffic cop of the Information
Superhighway.'' ''He's a logical choice,'' says a high-ranking Bush
source.
Those evaluations spring primarily from Powell's resume, a document
long on FCC-centric credentials. Prior to assuming the commissioner's
chair in 1997, for example, Powell was chief of staff at the Justice
Department's Antitrust Division and formerly practiced
telecommunications and antitrust law at O'Melveny & Myers, LLP. He
also served a three-year stint in the U.S. Army as a cavalry officer
after attending the College of William & Mary and receiving a law
degree from Georgetown University.
Nor does the commissioner lack for a conduit to the upper reaches of
the Republican Party: His father is Secretary of State nominee Colin
Powell.
The younger Powell, a huggy bear of a man, seems happy to let his
father represent the family in the media spotlight. Although he has all
the traits of a Republican Party star -- he's young, smart and
African-American -- Powell is best known to the techno-geeks who
hover around the FCC, not to GOP hob-nobbers. ''He sticks to his job,''
says prominent Republican fund-raiser Julie Finley. ''He's a person
who does his work and takes his family and career very seriously.''
In his three years on the FCC, Powell did perhaps his best work as
head of an agency Y2K compliance panel, compiling reports on the
readiness of more than 2,000 communications companies across the
country and browbeating them into averting digital Armageddon. ''He
kicked butt,'' chirps an FCC source.
The Y2K project bespoke Powell's administrative dexterity and his
prospects for leading a bipartisan commission. (By law, the FCC may
not have more than three of its five commissioners from the same
party.) Even though he occasionally raps his Democratic colleagues,
he's chummier with regulatory centrists than with the extremists that
populate the Republican right. Powell's image as a consensus builder is
only enhanced by the nitpickings of Republican colleague Harold
Furchtgott-Roth, who keeps agency staffers busy circulating his
predictable dissenting opinions from FCC initiatives.
Given those qualifications, the only one who can keep commissioner
Powell from sliding into the chairmanship is himself. ''He's in the catbird
seat,'' says Andrew Jay Schwartzman, president of the Media
Access Project. ''He gets to decide whether he wants anything else
for which he is qualified.''
Should Powell bolt for, say, a sub-cabinet post at the Justice
Department, the Bush administration would likely install Pat Wood,
chairman of the Texas Public Utility Commission, as the next FCC
head.
Wherever Powell lands, his ideology on the use of federal power will
please a boss who regularly decried ''big government'' and called
''insurance'' a ''Washington'' term during the campaign. Powell's
orthodoxy surfaced in a May 1999 dissenting statement when the FCC
approved a budget increase for a program to bring the Internet into all
public schools. Powell wrote that in funding the increase and vesting
the program with $2.25 billion, the commissioners were acting like
classic tax-and-spenders. ''Like in the movie Field of Dreams, if you
build it, they will come. And, as one would expect, we built a large
federal program and they have come,'' wrote Powell, noting that
needy school districts across the country had made claims on the
program.
When he's not preaching budgetary parsimony, Powell crusades for a
minimalist FCC, one constrained by its relationship to other antitrust
actors in the federal bureaucracy. In appearances before
congressional committees and advocacy groups, Powell has
campaigned for a shrinking of the agency's investigation of mergers in
the media and telecommunications sectors. The Justice Department
and the Federal Trade Commission, he points out, already conduct
extensive antitrust reviews. Why shouldn't the FCC adhere narrowly
to its legislative mandate?
Former FCC chairman Reed Hundt, who staked out the opposite
position, remains wary of commissioners flirting with regulatory
minimalism: ''I think the purpose of the FCC is to follow the law, and
the law doesn't give the FCC the latitude to abandon the public
interest,'' says Hundt.
To consumer advocates, Powell's words sound like a regulatory holiday
benefiting big business. Says Peggy Charren, the godmother of
requirements for children's educational TV: ''He is a pleasant enough
individual but has not been a strong supporter of what I worry about.''
''Michael Powell,'' says Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the
Center for Media Education, ''reflects the Washington, D.C.,
conservative think tank ethos, which is, they never saw a special
interest they didn't want to deregulate.''
Deregulation under a Powell-led commission would no doubt please
media firms, which will probably see a loosening of merger restrictions.
Nor would Powell be inclined to curb cable rates or mandate open
access to cable lines nationwide -- two areas in which the new
commission could improve upon the Kennard FCC, according to
consumer advocate Mark Cooper. ''Over the past four years, (the
Democrats) have done nothing for our issues,'' says Cooper. • |
