FCC DEREGULATION'S ROCKY ROAD.

Michael Powell, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, used last week's National Association of Broadcasters' annual convention as a forum to defend his plan to implement an empirical formula that would determine the diversity of print and broadcast voices in a market.

Powell's plan -- which would develop a method similar to one used by the Justice Department to compute whether anti-trust violations have been met and has been called a "diversity index" -- is under attack by both Republican and Democrat commissioners; the party of the current presidential administration gets a majority of members on the commission and appoints the chairman.

Critics of the proposal suggest that each market should be considered individually.

Commissioner Kevin Martin, a Republican, last week told Reuters he preferred simple rules without complicated mathematical formulas to measure market voices.

"It really isn't that complicated, the idea at least," Powell said. "I don't think that there should be a freak out about the possibility of both using data and mathematical methods."

Nonetheless, Dow Jones reported that Powell met with television network affiliates while at the Las Vegas broadcasters conference in an attempt to win them over to his viewpoint.

Network affiliates oppose any loosening of the current broadcast ownership rules because they believe that large media companies will just get larger and undercut whatever power the affiliates might have.

On the FCC's table for discussion are two distinctly different issues.

The first is to increase the ceiling limit of the reach of any one broadcast company -- currently set at 35 percent of the nation's households. Large media companies are proposing an increase to as much as 50 percent of households. The second is to allow newspapers and television stations in the same market to be owned by the same company.

The commission has been compelled to review these limits not only by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 -- which set out a pattern of biennial review of broadcast regulations -- but also by the U.S. Court of Appeals, which last year ruled that the 35 percent limit was arbitrary and that the commission needed to justify it.

Powell clearly heard the appeals court and has been the driving force behind the diversity index, believing that it can survive a court challenge.

Democratic commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein have indicated they are against changing either of the rules and have sponsored public hearings where independent publishers, independent broadcasters, union officials and consumer groups have decried the effort.

"It's important that we come up with something that can pass muster in the courts, but I don't think that's the only responsibility of the commission," Copps was quoted by Dow Jones as telling reporters last month. "We're not looking for just any old rule that will pass muster with the courts, we're looking for the right rule that will pass muster with the courts."

Flanking Powell on the right is Martin, who in a crucial commission vote in March seemed to indicate that he prefers major deregulation  of the broadcasting industry. Martin has also repeatedly indicated that he believes the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rule should be relaxed, if not abolished. Conversely, Martin has also shown sympathy with the position of network affiliates.

Despite the turmoil on the issue, both Powell and the head of commission's media bureau believe it will be addressed in a matter of weeks. Reuters quoted the media bureau's Kenneth Ferree last week as saying that "there will be no delay" in adopting the new rules at a meeting on June 2.

Copps and Adelstein grumbled during a broadcasters' conference panel discussion that they had less than 50 days to review the diversity index proposal, which they don't yet have.

Further, Copps was quoted by Reuters as saying that the diversity index would end up adding more regulation to the industry.

"It seems to me for a commission that prides itself on deregulation, that this gets us awfully far down the road to micro-regulation," Copps was quoted by Reuters as saying.

It has been a lousy few months for Mssrs. Powell, pere et fils (Michael's father is U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell): the secretary of state was unable to negotiate a resolution to the Iraqi situation (plunging us into war) and the FCC chairman has blown the deregulation of broadcasting and the abolishment of the cross-ownership rule (plunging the commission into a political morass). The FCC chair needs to start working the commission like a good politician and come up with a compromise solution that will keep those both to his right and to his left happy. Admittedly not an easy challenge, but Powell has been bobbling the ball recently and it needs to stop.