Yesterday's sweeping Democratic victory likely means more trouble for TV broadcasters in Washington, according to the industry's lawyers and lobbyists and communications policy mavens.

With Barack Obama in the White House and a larger Democratic majority on Capitol Hill, industry reps fear Congress and a reconstituted FCC may push for local programming quotas, more children's programming requirements, restrictions on product placements and mandates for free air time for candidates.

The Democrats have historically been less enthusiastic about policing broadcast indecency, they point out, but many would like nothing better than to bring back the fairness doctrine to muzzle their many right-wing critics on radio.

And broadcasters can forget about looser ownership restrictions, they say. The challenge will be to keep the Democrats from tightening them to encourage more diversity in media ownership, one of their oft-stated policy goals.

"It's not going to be pretty," says one long-time broadcast lobbyist.

"There is very legitimate reason to worry about an Obama FCC and what it means for the future of broadcast and all media," says Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank.

"Specifically, what I fear is not the same thing that some others fear like a revival of the fairness doctrine. What I fear is a lot of backdoor regulation through proceedings like localism or the revival of the personal attack rule or community advisory boards for broadcasters."

The big change will be at the FCC.

The Democrat minority at the five-person agency will become a majority next January when Republican Chairman Kevin Martin resigns and fellow Republican Commissioner Deborah Tate steps down as her term expires.

Obama will tap one of the sitting Democratic commissioners, Michael Copps or Jonathan Adelstein, to run the agency until the new president gets around to nominating (and the Senate gets around to confirming) a new permanent chairman — a process that could take several months.

Neither Copps nor Adelstein is good news for broadcasters, the lobbyists say.

Both have vigorously opposed all efforts to loosen broadcast ownership rules and have championed new public service programming obligations for broadcasters.

They contend that media consolidation is limiting the diversity of voices in media and they believe the American public is getting less than it should from broadcasters in exchange for the valuable spectrum.

The Democratic duo has also gone along with Martin's crackdown on broadcast indecency, Copps most enthusiastically.

When the new chairman arrives, the broadcast reps figure he or she is likely to share much the same regulatory philosophy as Copps and Adelstein and much the same do-more attitude toward broadcasting.

Most also believe it is also an ominous sign that some of Obama's key advisers on broadcasting and cable issues are the same people who ran the FCC during the Clinton administration.

Those advisers are led by Julius Genachowski, an Obama classmate at Harvard Law and fundraiser who was FCC general counsel under Chairman Reed Hundt. They include Hundt himself and Bill Kennard, who succeeded Hundt as chairman. Genachowski introduced Obama to Hundt and Kennard.

Neither Hundt nor Kennard was broadcasting-friendly.

Hundt, in particular, fought a long and bitter battle with broadcasters to impose kids programming quotes on TV stations. He would probably have gone further in heaping on public service obligations if he could have.

On the other hand, Hundt and Kennard presided over a good deal of media consolidation in the wake of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and they put into place the policy that will lead to TV stations' analog-to-digital conversion in February.

Not everybody thinks a return to the Hundt-Kennard philosophy would be so bad.

"The Clinton administration had a business-oriented FCC," says one lawyer. "They had certain issues like kidvid that they wanted, but they also recognized that people actually had to make money to operate. You could have an FCC like that, which may not be too bad."

Some lobbyists chagrined by a Democratic takeover of the FCC concede that a McCain-driven FCC chairman might have been worse.

McCain chaired the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees broadcasting and cable matters, from 1997 until 2001 and again from 2003 until 2005. All the years were marked by conflict between McCain and broadcasters.

Much of the friction flowed from McCain's belief that broadcasters should pay for their digital spectrum.

He once called the grant of digital channels to broadcasters "the great American rip-off," believing that broadcasters would never return their analog spectrum.

McCain also saw broadcasters as big obstacles to his efforts to reform campaign financing.

In a move that some broadcasters felt was punitive, McCain introduced a bill that would have reduced station license terms from eight years to three.

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