[IP] more on The FCC Chairman Has No Clothes
Begin forwarded message:
From: Barry Ritholtz <ritholtz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: November 24, 2004 6:42:54 AM EST
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: The FCC Chairman Has No Clothes
Hey Dave,
My comments yesterday -- Why compete when we can cheat? -- provoked a
handful of comments. A few people thought that I was being too harsh on
the FCC, and by implication FCC chair Michael Powell.
For those of you who thought calling the FCC incompetent and misfocused
was too harsh, consider the following critique of the FCC head by Tom
Shales in the Washington Post:
Michael Powell Exposed! The FCC Chairman Has No Clothes
By Tom Shales
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62718-2004Nov19.html
Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page N01
Oops. They got rid of the wrong Powell. The father unfortunately is
going, but the son, even more unfortunately, remains behind.
Colin Powell, as most Americans know, has "resigned" his position as
secretary of state, though few in the inner circle of the coldhearted
Bush administration will likely be shedding tears at his departure.
Staying in office, however, and capable of wreaking havoc in American
broadcasting until 2007, is Colin's son Michael Powell, chairman of the
Federal Communications Commission and definitely not a force for good
in America.
Pompous and imperious, an ideologue who believes unfailingly in his own
philosophy of how TV and radio should work (the FCC also has domain
over telephone and emerging broadband technologies), Powell ignores or
condemns anyone who opposes him. Though FCC chairmen have labored
mostly in obscurity, Powell has managed to make himself famous; he's
the Torquemada of the insane campaign now being waged against
"obscenity" on the airwaves.
There was according to legend a face that launched a thousand ships.
This is about a nipple that inflamed a thousand nut cases. Janet
Jackson's brief breast exposure during halftime of this year's Super
Bowl has led to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, a wave of
hypocritical hysteria with which Democrats as well as Republicans are
only too happy to be associated, and a state of affairs that boils down
to open season on the First Amendment, the bedrock of the Bill of
Rights.
At no point did anyone, including Chairman Powell, positioned now like
Attila at the head of the Huns, produce one single living creature --
man, woman, child, toddler, infant, newborn, late-term fetus, dog, cat,
rooster, horse or parakeet -- who saw the briefly exposed nipple and
was in any tangible way harmed by it. Like most of the halftime
entertainment, it was tastelessly inappropriate, but the ensuing mass
fuss is a farce that has made America an international laughingstock
again.
Tired as the topic is, one must mention the nipple when recounting what
might be called the Sins of Michael Powell, since it's a highlight of
his bumpy, disgraceful tenure as FCC chairman. The furor it generated
resulted not only in a $550,000 fine to be paid by CBS, which aired the
Super Bowl (and is owned by Viacom, whose MTV produced the halftime
show), but in more and more punishments meted out over more and more
alleged infractions, many involving naughty words that had previously
been uttered without incident (no cases of shock reported in trauma
units, for instance, and no outbreaks of rioting in the streets).
One result is to make Howard Stern, however improbably, a national
hero. After two decades on the radio doing material of a certain nature
that every American was free to avoid, Stern found himself under
all-out attack from the FCC, which started fining stations and station
groups for carrying his program. The two met electronically recently
when Stern got through to a San Francisco call-in show on which Powell
was a guest and they exchanged insults.
In fairness to Powell, the commission's two Democratic members, Michael
J. Copps and Jonathan S. Adelstein, have been among those pushing for
not only fines but license revocations when stations violate the
still-vague obscenity rules. They are idiots.
And the networks are hardly just angelic victims. In this increasingly
hysterical climate, ABC was spectacularly stupid in beginning last
Monday's NFL telecast with a raunchy scene set in a locker room and
featuring a fully dressed player being seduced by a woman in a towel.
She dropped the towel and jumped naked into his arms. Powell then
jumped into the spotlight and by Wednesday was pontificating about the
episode on CNBC: "I wonder if Walt Disney would be proud." ABC is a
Disney-owned company.
Naturally, an FCC spokesman said complaints were pouring in. Complaints
pour in now about everything. Any day now, somebody will complain that
the Energizer bunny is naked. And yet for all this alleged public
distress over naughtiness on the airwaves, the most popular new series
of the year is also the raciest: "Desperate Housewives" on ABC.
The madness reached its appalling apotheosis on Veterans Day:
Sixty-five of ABC's 220 owned or affiliated stations declined to air
the universally praised Steven Spielberg film "Saving Private Ryan,"
about American heroes of World War II, because the verboten F-word is
spoken several times, and the FCC now fines stations sometimes
astronomical amounts if even a few people file complaints over what
they have heard.
This means Spielberg's acclaimed Holocaust film, "Schindler's List,"
cannot be shown again on a broadcast network because it, too, contains
unpleasant language and, of course, graphic violence. See, it's about
the Nazis, and they tended to be a little pushy. But realism is no
defense, artistic excellence is no defense, even a consensus that the
program in question constitutes a public service is no defense. (By
contractual agreement, Spielberg's films must be shown without
deletions or alterations.)
In large measure, the usual suspects are in the driver's seat --
fanatical right-wing groups that include words like "family" or
"decency" in their names and view increased permissiveness on TV as
part of a left-wing plot to undermine moral values. They have mastered
the art of making minor protests look like huge movements by
manipulating the Internet (thousands of "protest" votes at the click of
a mouse) or simply manning the mimeograph machine. People can sign form
letters even if they never saw the program in question.
Jeff Jarvis, TV Guide's last good TV critic and now prominent in the
blogger universe, uncovered a stupefying example of how the process
works and how unfair the FCC's actions are. He filed a Freedom of
Information Act request to see the 159 complaints supposedly received
at the FCC because of an April 2003 Fox special, "Married by America."
Now 159 seems like an insignificant enough number, but when Jarvis
checked further into the case, he found that most of the letters were
identical, produced by an "automated complaint factory," and that the
number of authentic, actual, original letters of complaint was not 159
but . . . three. Yes, three.
Result: Powell's FCC slaps Fox with a $1.2 million fine.
Even some of Powell's harshest critics credit him with being too
intelligent to dream up an obscenity like this campaign against
obscenity. At heart he may even have wanted to lie back and let the
uproar blow over. Another case involving the dread and soul-destroying
F-word indicated that Powell and the FCC might deal sensibly with such
issues. The singer Bono blurted it out when presented with a prize on a
music awards show. The commission's first impulse was to overlook this
transgression as having been spontaneous and unintentional -- and
besides, the word was used in its adjectival state, a participle and
not a verb.
But the pressure groups wouldn't accept that. They are tireless (don't
they have day jobs?) and they inundated Congress with still more
protests -- and Powell quickly switched positions. It didn't matter in
what context the word was used, the FCC decided, because there was no
context in which it could possibly be acceptable. What if President
Bush scampishly includes it in his second inaugural address? Who knows?
If Vice President Cheney's F-word outburst on Capitol Hill had only
been aired on ABC, CBS, NBC or Fox, FCC commissioners would have a
really nice, and richly deserved, mess on their hands.
Unable to deal with serious problems of the day, Congress opted instead
for transparent demagoguery. Powell, who came under attack from
lawmakers last year for his tireless efforts on behalf of giant
conglomerates and concentration of media ownership, saw a chance to get
back in its good graces. He now pontificates with vigor, building
himself a political base. The fines in most cases are symbolic; CBS can
pony up $550,000 any day of the week but will fight on principle.
The fines don't really compromise Powell's credentials as a
pro-industry man, a dilettante who invariably sides with the moneyed
minions of Big Broadcasting on the major issues, the ones likely to
have the most lasting effects. These are the actions that could qualify
as "sins," not just peculiarities of style.
I asked experienced industry insiders and activists to cite some
"sins," and their answers were familiar. They all requested anonymity
on the grounds that they must continue to deal with Powell's FCC no
matter what.
"Arrogant" is the adjective used most often in any discussion of Powell
and the way he pushes his personal agenda, an extension of the
fanatical deregulation that gathered steam under Ronald Reagan's FCC
chairman, a reckless loudmouth named Mark Fowler. Basically the
theology is this: Commercial interests come first, second and third
among priorities, and "the public interest, convenience and necessity,"
which the FCC is mandated to uphold, straggles in a distant fourth.
Powell is much better tailored and milder mannered than Fowler but
equally stubborn and self-adoring.
He seems never to have met a media merger he didn't like, which will
result in the virtual death of local television and radio in America as
station after station is sucked up into one enormous unfeeling
conglomerate or another. Powell scorns the pleas of public-minded
groups that try to meet with him, critics say, but will rush off
eagerly to any luncheon, dinner or cocktail party sponsored by big
corporate powers.
When criticized heavily for this during the uproar over Powell's
attempts to jettison the rules against media concentration (rules
designed to promote diversity in American broadcasting and keep one
company from acquiring too much media power, as Fox has now), Powell
grudgingly and belatedly scheduled a series of public forums on the
matter. "But he skipped half the public hearings he authorized,"
laments one of his many detractors. Another characterizes him thus:
"He's an elitist, he's arrogant, he's inaccessible, and he's incredibly
vain about his own ideas." Critics consider him so egotistical that he
will not listen or give any credence to the arguments of others. He has
a master plan in his head for what American broadcasting should be. It
really can be summed up in those four infamously immortal words, "The
public be damned."
Says one industry veteran who has seen many FCC chairmen come and go:
"Where we are now is the land of the bizarre."
Some people scoff. After all, it's widely assumed that the FCC's new
passion for fining stations and networks will be swept aside by the
courts, once it gets to them, for the audaciously unconstitutional
assault on the First Amendment that it is. But, one skeptic points out,
the Bush administration will be naming new judges to old courts. Bush
has been known to sneak in judicial appointments in the middle of the
night, literally.
We stand at the top of a dangerously slippery slope. When you start
leveling fines for uttering certain words, the list of the verboten is
bound to grow. We could be facing four years of even more paranoia than
usual about Big Brother, much of it justified.
Over the decades, although the job wasn't usually considered a plum
appointment, men of distinction, intelligence and integrity have served
as chairman of the FCC -- such men as Charles Ferris (1977-81), Richard
Wiley (1974-77), Dean Burch (1969-1974) and the most famous chairman,
at least until now, Newton Minow, an intellectual and scholar who
coined the phrase "vast wasteland" to describe prime-time TV and used
the power of his office to try to make television better, not censor
it.
Powell belongs at the bottom of the barrel with the lowliest of the
bunch. He is an agenda masquerading as a man, the proverbial pompous
ass and, worse, a genuine threat to freedom of speech. But on CNBC, he
was playing Santa Claus. "I am still having fun," he said merrily, as
if that were part of the job. "There are still things that are really
significantly important to me to complete. Right now, I just have no
plans of going anywhere."
That's the problem. If he were looking for places to go, I could
suggest one in a snap. But it's a four-letter word and, who knows, I
might end up in jail.
Scathing . . .
Barry L. Ritholtz
Chief Market Strategist
Maxim Group
405 Lexington Avenue,
New York, NY 10174
(212) 895-3614
(800) 724-0761
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