Thinking Positive About an Obama FCC

John Eggerton, B&C's Washingon bureau chief, has been doing a good job teasing out what kind of communications policy to expect from an Obama administration.

Most notably, he ran a written Q&A that Obama put his name to. To date, it provides the best insight into his thinking on broadcasting and cable.

Also must reading is the mini-debate on communications policy between former FCC chairmen Reed Hundt and Michael Powell as representatives of Obama and McCain, respectively, which Eggerton also dutifully reported.

On the whole, these reports and others are discouraging for TV broadcasters, but they leave room for hope.

Not surprising, the presumptive Democratic nominee is dead set against further media consolidation and wants to keep current ownership limits in place.

Indeed, he is a co-sponsor of the Senate bill that would reverse the FCC modest relaxation of the newspaper-broadcast crossownership ban.

And, given all the consolidation, Hundt, speaking for Obama, called for "new policies that promote diversity and localism." That, I fear, sounds like the local programming quotas that the current FCC is already on the way toward imposing.

Obama doesn't advocate a lighter hand on broadcast indecency regulation, although the way he danced around the question in the Q&A suggests it's not as big an issue for him as it has been for Republicans who have to answer to the religious right.

To his credit, Obama doesn't believe indecency regulation should be extended to cable and satellite.

Obama's spokesman Michael Ortiz told Eggerton that his boss has no interest in bringing back the fairness doctrine, that odious symbol of broadcasters' second-class citizenship.

But Ortiz said it was not because he opposed the rule, but because he felt it was a "distraction from the conversation we should be having about opening up the airwaves and modern communications to as many diverse viewpoints as possible."

Allow me to translate: Trying to bring back the fairness doctrine would trigger a violent backlash from loud-mouthed radio talk show hosts who actually enjoy the freedom of (and whose livelihoods depend on) saying whatever they damn well please on the air. Why would Obama want to stir up that mob?

But why should broadcasters hope?

Obama seems to believe that at least part of the answer to the consolidation of the traditional media is not new structural regulations, but in stricter enforcement of the antitrust laws and in maintaining the Internet as a vital and wide-open alternative to traditional media.

Obama is on the right track here.

Media mergers — large or small — should be judged solely on antitrust grounds by either the DOJ or FTC on the same economic grounds as any other merger.

Perhaps if Obama trusted the DOJ and FTC to scrutinize media deals closely — and in an Obama administration, why wouldn't he? He might be persuaded to go along with legislation or rulemakings that modestly relax media ownership limits.

By the way, the Obama camp keeps suggesting that the Bush administration has blindly presided over a frenzy of media companies gobbling each other up.

For the record, the heavy consolidation happened during the Clinton administration. Relatively speaking, the Bush administration has been a period of media deconsolidation and, incidentally, privatization.

Just on the macro level, in the last couple years, we have seen the break up of Viacom-CBS, Belo, Scripps and Clear Channel and are anticipating Time Warner's spin-off of its cable division. Soon enough, GE will tire of NBC Universal.

Obama also seems to understand that the Internet is an alternative to traditional media and that the more powerful it becomes, the less need there will be for special rules and regulations that hobble broadcasting.

Obama and McCain disagree on how to make the Internet flourish. Obama favors Net neutrality regulation that would prevent the big telecom companies from discriminating among content providers in the level of service they provide.

According to Powell, McCain fears that any kind of regulation will backfire, making the Internet less "free and open."

Reasonable men and women can disagree on this one. Broadcasters ought to start thinking about where they stand as they branch out on the Web. Net neutrality will be a big issue over the next few years.

In divining what an Obama administration would mean to broadcasting, you have to look beyond his Senate record and his few utterances to who is advising him on such matters.

That would be not only be Hundt, but also Bill Kennard, who succeeded Hundt as FCC chairman during Clinton's second term; Blair Levin, the FCC chief of staff during the Hundt years; and, perhaps most important, Julius Genachowski.

As TVNewsday's Kim McAvoy first reported a year ago, Genachowski, who was a top aide to Hundt at the FCC, is a former Havard Law school classmate of Obama and a major fundraiser for him. It was he who introduced Obama to Hundt and Kennard.

If Genachowski is not Obama's pick for FCC chairman, he will be behind the scenes deeply involved in making that pick.

The Hundt and Kennard FCCs were not particularly friendly toward broadcasting or cable. Hundt seized the 1992 Cable Act to over-regulate cable rates and he fought a long and bitter battle to impose kids programming quotas on broadcasters. If he had his druthers, he probably would have imposed other news and public service requirement on stations.

On the other hand, as I already noted, Hundt and Kennard presided over a good deal of media consolidation at all levels and put in place a DTV policy for which all broadcasters should be thankful.

Thinking ahead of most broadcasters, Hundt made sure that broadcasters had ample flexibility in how they could use their digital spectrum. That flexibility may be the thing that saves broadcasting from obsolescence.

And these are smart guys.

They know the world has changed since they were running things just a decade ago. TV broadcasting no longer dominates the mediascape and never will again. They should recognize the need for a lighter hand.

So, why not believe that the Obama FCC will come in with the inclination not to regulate broadcasting, but to make sure that it prospers in this increasingly competitive era and continues to provide the fine public service it currently does? Perhaps a little deregulation will be in order.

Let's call it the audacity of hope.

Harry A. Jessell is editor of TVNewsday. You can contact him at hajessell@tvnewsday.com.