Holding the line at the FCC.

• Author: McChesney, Robert W.

NEAR THE DOOR TO HIS OFFICE in the building where the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is housed, Commissioner Michael J. Copps has posted a framed letter from Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the great chronicler of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Presidency. When Copps joined the FCC in 2001, following a distinguished career on Capitol Hill and in the Clinton Administration, he made a comment about the New Deal's legacy of regulation in the public interest. Schlesinger wrote to express his delight at learning that someone in Washington was still willing to assert the principle that government ought to do more than simply get out of the way and let big business and its lobbies call the shots.

Schlesinger still knows how to spot the heroes.

At a time when the White House and Congress are fully in the grips of corporate America, and when most of the federal bureaucracy seems to be determined to bend every rule to serve the interests of the largest campaign contributors, Copps is raising the flag of public interest. And while he may not be winning every fight, he has already succeeded in changing the character of one of the most significant public policy debates in the history of media regulation. He is a central player in the burgeoning media reform movement that has risen to challenge corporate control over media and media policymaking.

This spring, the FCC is considering proposals to eliminate the handful of longstanding restrictions on media ownership that still remain. The rules under threat prohibit firms from owning newspapers and TV stations in the same town, or cable TV systems and TV stations in the same town, and they limit the number of TV stations and cable TV systems a firm can own nationally. With the largest media firms salivating at the thought of being able to gobble up more properties, and with a Republican majority on the five-member FCC, it appeared until just a few months ago that these media ownership rules were goners. FCC Chairman Michael Powell is an outspoken opponent of such rules and eager to let the so-called free market work its magic. All signs indicated that the deregulation would go through in much the same manner as the sweeping 1996 Telecommunications Act--with virtually no opposition or awareness by the general public. The fix, it would seem, was in.

But the big media had not figured in the Copps effect. Unwilling to roll over and allow the crushing of some of the last vestiges of regulatory protection for real diversity in media, Copps began to raise public interest concerns with a force not heard on the FCC since Nicholas Johnson challenged the corporate line back in the 1960s or Clifford Durr battled the networks as a progressive New Dealer in the 1940s. Before rules governing ownership are eliminated, Copps said, the commission should go out and hear what the American people think about one company owning most of their sources of information, about the potential loss of local content in their newspapers, on radio, and on television, and about the even broader question of whether allowing a handful of corporations to dominate American media might pose a threat to democracy itself.

To understand how remarkable Copps's questioning of the commissions course is, consider what had been status quo for the FCC. Recall that former FCC Chairman William Kennard acknowledged that...