The Great Deregulator; Five Months Into His Tenure as FCC Chairman, Michael Powell Is Coming Through Loud and Clear
By Frank Ahrens; Washington Post Staff Writer; Monday, June 18, 2001; Page C01
For a man who has said he wants his record to speak for him, for an agency head who has vowed not to be an activist, Michael Kevin Powell entered the Washington political conversation with a pool-clearing cannonball off the high-dive.
In February the new Federal Communications Commission chairman met the press for the first time. Powell, 38, had been one of the FCC's five commissioners since 1997 -- a fairly low-profile position, if you want it to be. In January the Clinton-appointed FCC chairman, William Kennard, resigned. The Bush administration quickly picked Powell as successor.
What was known about Powell:
o He was the son of Secretary of State/war hero/possible presidential candidate/Most Admired American Colin Powell.
o He'd had some kind of accident while in the Army.
o He was a black Republican whose commission votes often, but not predictably, favored both big business and minority broadcasters.
What was less known about Powell was exposed at his introductory news conference: that he has an impatience for sloganeering and an ex-soldier's appetite for a little hand-to-hand combat.
Several dozen reporters were peppering the new chairman. The Question came at the end of the one-hour session:
"I wanted to see if you could give us your thoughts about this agency's role in dealing with the so-called digital divide . . ."
The next day's papers printed part of Powell's answer:
"I think there's a Mercedes divide. I'd like one, but I can't afford it."
Ker-splash! Everybody's wet!
Immediately the controversy began. Powell took heat from lawmakers, from minority broadcasters, from advocacy groups. He was told that he sounded insensitive, aloof. It would have been a terrific line -- if Powell were a provocateur talk radio host.
But, good grief, everyone knows the Washington answer to that question: You're against the digital divide. You'll do everything you can to eradicate it. Next question?
Instead . . .
"He sent shudders throughout the entire industry," says Talib Karim, a Washington telecommunications lawyer. "There are programs built on removing the digital divide and people felt that statement almost completely killed the need to pursue those programs."
Over the past decade, the FCC has gone from being just another big Washington alphabet bureaucracy -- FCC, FTC, FAA -- to one of the most important. The communications revolution has reached seemingly every corner of the culture. Ten years ago, car phones were exotic. Now, you can buy a top-grade cell phone at any 7-Eleven.
As FCC chairman, Powell is the chief regulator of the companies that determine what you watch on television and listen to on the radio. He also applies the law to companies that provide telephone service, Internet access, cable television, cell phone and pager service and just about every other form of human and machine communication. FCC decisions made today will shape how Americans converse for years to come.
So people pay a lot of attention when the chairman communicates.
The "Mercedes gap" answer proved a fine distillation of the man: Powell gave a long (4 1/2-minute) response, full of provocative ideas, in an occasionally combative tone that nevertheless got some laughs. He bristled at the notion that a slogan should be turned into public policy, least of all by an unelected body.
Here's what bracketed the Mercedes Quote:
"I also think the term ["digital divide"] sometimes is dangerous in the sense that it suggests that the minute a new and innovative technology is introduced in the market, there is a divide unless it is equitably distributed among every part of the society, and that is just an unreal understanding of an American capitalistic system. . . . [Mercedes Quote here] . . . I'm not meaning to be completely flip about this -- I think it's an important social issue -- but it shouldn't be used to justify the notion of, essentially, the socialization of deployment of the infrastructure."
The entire quote establishes the new FCC chairman's bona fides as a probing, iconoclastic market capitalist. The Mercedes quote alone? It made him look about as out of touch with the common folk as his current president's father when confronted by a supermarket checkout scanner. And a little meaner, too.
Regrets?
"I might regret the phrase only because people might have misinterpreted it," Powell is saying now, in a recent interview in his spacious corner office on the eighth floor of the FCC's headquarters in Southwest Washington. "But I do not regret what I was trying to explain: If we're prepared to be serious and not symbolic, let's talk about the digital divide."
And so he talks:
"People have swept up in that concept every hope and aspiration you can imagine." And: "Some people can afford a Mercedes, some people can afford a Toyota Tercel. But they both have available to them the same basic functionality of a car." And: "I had a professor once say to me, 'Name a technology that has bypassed poor people.' "
Sitting in his office, he is more voluble and relaxed than when facing down a horde of trade-publication reporters. He has the aura of a man who believes that, in any one-on-one conversation, he could bring you around to his point of view or at least gain your grudging respect. Not surprising, considering his strongest Capitol Hill allies are the often-blunt Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.). (The promotion from FCC commissioner to chairman bumped Powell's salary from $125,700 to $133,700.)
Powell's smooth features and high-cheekboned smile shave about five years off his age. Well trimmed in a charcoal pinstripe suit undergirded by suspenders, he settles into an upholstered armchair and crosses his right leg over his left.
It is not a meaningless posture.
Sitting in this fashion is easier on his spine, which is fused at its base, forcing him to walk with a slight forward pitch. And there's another thing: If an interviewer stabbed his Bic pen into the top of Powell's right thigh, the FCC chairman would not feel it.
Asleep at the Wheel
Explanation can be found in a right-hand drawer of Powell's big wooden desk, a few stiff-muscled paces away. There, he keeps four photographic slides, neatly inserted in a clear plastic scrapbook page. They're slides of X-rays.
They show a human's skeletal midsection, like the bones of a child's Halloween costume. But they look more like a puzzle: In one slide, the spine is where it ought to be, but the pelvis appears snapped in two, half of it floating inside the body at a cockeyed angle. Another slide shows the pelvis back in its place, but not on its own. Bones are bolted together by a steel truss that looks like a model railroad bridge.
This is Michael Powell's gut, circa 1987.
It was a warm summer evening of that year, and Powell was a 24-year-old executive officer with the U.S. Army's 3/2 Armored Cavalry regiment, stationed in Amberg, Germany.
He and his unit were traveling in a convoy on the autobahn, heading back to the base after a day of scouting the German countryside. The soldiers were in a convoy on the autobahn, traveling about 50 mph. Powell was riding shotgun in a World War II Jeep (the kind you see on "M*A*S*H" reruns). In the back seat was another officer; driving was a young private. No one wore a seat belt.
It began to rain, and Powell was lulled into a doze by the pit-pat of the raindrops and the droning sound of the wheels.
So was the driver.
Sensing the Jeep drift toward the guardrail on the right, Powell awoke and saw his driver's head bobbing. Powell barked at him to wake up; the private snapped awake and jerked the wheel left, sending the Jeep veering into oncoming traffic. Panicked, he yanked the wheel back.
Powell knew what would come next.
"The Jeep lay down on its side," Powell says, using his hands to illustrate. "I can see the sparks and hear the noise right now. I have this burned into my brain; I can do it frame by frame."
Powell was hurled skyward. He hit the pavement and rolled. Then, according to military officials who reconstructed the accident, the Jeep bounced, crashed down on Powell's midsection -- flattening it -- and bounced off.
"Don't move! Don't get up!" were the first words Powell remembers hearing, the soft voices emerging from the quiet, growing louder and louder as if someone were slowly turning the volume knob in his brain.
He felt no pain.
"I couldn't figure out how to move. It's not like my legs were hurt; it's like they were gone. I had no mental connection to my legs."
His arms still worked. He reached down to feel his hip. It felt three times its normal size. He wanted a drink of water.
Rain sprinkled on him as he lay on the pavement. He closed his eyes.
"Oh, my God," he thought. "I broke my back."
Instinct for Survival
Half of Powell's pelvic girdle had snapped off its rear anchor on the lower spine. In the front, it had ripped free of the cartilage connecting it to its other half. His bladder was torn and the urethra was ripped loose. Vertebrae were cracked. Even his bones gushed blood.
"Essentially, your middle is broken in half," Powell says. "You're literally separated."
After a few hours, and some cursory attention from German emergency room doctors, Powell was flown to a U.S. Army hospital in Nuremberg. After being stabilized, he was flown to Washington and admitted to Walter Reed Army Medical Center on upper Georgia Avenue NW.
"Where I lived for the next year," he says.
The family cinched around the young Powell. Linda Powell, one of his two sisters, slept in his hospital room, helping with his physical therapy. And when he returned home, the Powells set up a hospital bed in a downstairs room; his other sister, Annemarie, slept on the floor and woke during the night to turn over her brother, a former high school gymnast.
The three-star general sat with his son, holding his hand and watching "Brady Bunch" reruns on television. (Colin and Alma Powell declined to be interviewed for this article.)
"He went through tremendous amounts of depression," says Annemarie of her brother.
Every act was freighted with struggle and debasement: Powell urinated for months through a tube in his abdomen.
In a 1996 speech Powell gave to the Rehabilitation Nursing Foundation, he said, with a mix of power, pathos and melodrama:
"I had hit bottom. This was dangerously real, and I was losing. . . . It is as if you are cast on a great dark ocean with no rescue in sight and are forced to ask yourself each and every moment if you wish to fight with all you have to live, or let go of your burden and drown peacefully. . . . In the end, it was not really a choice, but an instinct for survival."
After a year of physical therapy, he regained most elements of a normal life. He defied expectations by fathering two children. His right thigh, however, remains dead to the touch.
The accident ended his military career. Powell, who always planned to follow in his father's footsteps, was devastated. (Family legend recalls a letter that a young Michael Powell wrote to his father, then stationed in Vietnam: "I haven't decided yet if I want to be a lieutenant colonel or a lawyer.")
His sister Linda sees the accident's hidden benefit.
"I sometimes wonder if it didn't let him off the hook earlier," says the 36-year-old New York City actress. "It enabled him to find himself quicker. It would have taken him longer to figure out who he was in my father's field."
Powell does not disagree. He now calls the accident "the best thing that ever happened to me." Chiefly, he means that it led his old College of William & Mary girlfriend -- Jane Knott -- to his bedside and eventually to the altar. (Powell sometimes refers to her as "Jane, his wife," as in the "Jetsons" theme song.)
And though after his rehabilitation he knocked around Defense Department jobs for a couple of years, he eventually realized he had to break from the Army, he says. He got a Georgetown law degree and did stints in the Washington office of O'Melveny & Myers, an L.A.-based firm, and in the Department of Justice's antitrust division.
Internet gossip Matt Drudge and New Republic writer Andrew Sullivan have criticized the "nepotism" of Powell's political ascent; those who know him insist that his father's name may have opened doors -- he was pushed for the FCC by McCain, a Friend-of-Colin -- but believe the younger Powell's ability took over from there.
As for Michael Powell, his response to the nepotism specter is essentially unchanged today from when the subject was broached nearly four years ago, when he joined the FCC:
"I'm sure there were a whole lot of people in this town that, when my name surfaced, they said, 'He must be getting this because he's the son of somebody,' " Powell told the Associated Press in 1998. "Personally, I really enjoy the fact that some people have underestimated expectations of me. That's just great because it is just running room. Sure, go ahead and underestimate me."
And, if Powell's political ascent seems rapid, supporters say, it's because he's had his foot on the gas since he put down his crutches:
"Life is short and there's no guarantees," Powell says. "I don't have time for negative people, I don't have time for an unhappy disposition or an unhappy outlook on life. I can taste the preciousness of life."
The FCC
Powell wants his record to speak for itself, and so far it has. But people are hearing different things.
He is emerging as a deregulatory chairman, and not surprisingly the commercial broadcasters like him. Recent rulings by his commission, for instance, will allow one of the four major television networks -- ABC, CBS, NBC or Fox -- to buy one of the smaller ones -- UPN or the WB. Critics see this as another step toward corporate consolidation, which, they warn, will end only when one company owns everything.
"He has a disappointingly narrow view of the role that government has played in creating the marketplace and the diversity that is in the marketplace and in the mass media," says Andrew Schwartzman, president of the Media Access Project, a Washington telecommunications watchdog group. Schwartzman says he admires Powell and adds: "I would hope that every now and then as chairman, [Powell] will use his extraordinary intelligence and creativity as well as his bulletproof political position to take a difficult position on an issue."
Powell says his first thought in FCC decisions is always the consumer. He voted, for example, for Kennard's proposal to allow low-power radio stations, which was aimed at increasing the diversity of voices on the radio. Yet, he adds: "I believe government has the role and duty of proving the merits of intervention rather than the other way around. If I can't demonstrate with rigor the necessity of intervention, then the obligation of the government is to stay out."
Where Powell says he differs from previous Republican-led FCCs is on television and radio content: He says his liberal friends at law school convinced him that "it's better to tolerate the abuses on the margins than to invite the government to interfere with the cherished First Amendment."
Last Tuesday, however, the FCC fined radio station KKMG in Pueblo, Colo., $7,000 for playing "The Real Slim Shady," a sexually explicit, profanity-laced song by rapper Eminem. The station played a cleaned-up version of the song, but the FCC nevertheless found KKMG guilty of "willfully broadcasting indecent language." The ruling left many in the radio industry wondering if the action signaled a return to the early '90s, when a Republican-led FCC stacked up $1.2 million in fines against shock jock Howard Stern.
In February, a group of black telecom lawyers gave a send-off party to Kennard at the swank Dupont Circle headquarters of WorldSpace, a satellite radio company.
Powell's presence turned the night into a de facto changing of the FCC guard.
Powell heaped praise on his predecessor, the first African American to head the FCC, and talked about America's third major revolution of the past few hundred years. In the first two -- the agricultural and industrial revolutions -- black people either "picked cotton" or were "legally segregated." In the Information Revolution now underway, he said, minorities have their first chance to take the lead.
Kennard followed, saying he had tried to provide "opportunity for people who don't have a voice in Washington."
The reaction to both men was respectful and warm, but the needle on the love-meter climbed perceptibly higher for Kennard.
"That's one assessment of it," Powell says. "I think it's probably realistic."
The subtext in the room echoed what was felt in some quarters of Washington: that Kennard, as a Democratic, had fought for the common man. And that Powell, as a Republican, would fight for The Man.
The sub-subtext was: Republicans are for whites; Democrats, for blacks.
Powell finds this ludicrous.
"I don't think there's anything about my race that says I have to be a Democrat."
Tom Hart, a longtime Washington telecom lawyer present at the Kennard farewell party, sees good and bad in Powell's beliefs, if they become FCC policies.
"The advantages are that [such policies] will likely continue the technological growth and expansion that have emerged over the last 10 years," he says. "But what it does in the midterm is curtail the new entry of small, typically minority, business enterprises." Without incentives and some government protection, Hart says, the start-ups simply can't compete against the industry giants.
Jesse Jackson, addressing the annual convention of the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters in Washington in March, criticized Powell for a laissez-faire attitude that eventually would limit black voices in broadcasting.
It is unclear, however, if Powell will even be at the FCC long enough to see any policies bear fruit. Though he was reconfirmed for a five-year term last month, some observers wonder if he won't be tapped to run for elective office or perhaps take a White House appointment before his FCC term expires. Powell will say only that he has "no such laid-out grand ambitions" for his career.
What is clear is how he sees his role at the FCC.
He tells a story about being buttonholed by a congressman shortly after accepting the chairmanship. Powell responded with rapid-fire force.
"I want you to be more than a good steward," the congressman told Powell. "I want you to be a champion."
"I told him, 'I'm not a champion. I'm paid to make this stuff work.' "
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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