Small Ball at the FCC
By Ted Hearn -- Multichannel News, 8/27/2007 2:45:00 AM MT
At the White House, the Bush people do not, in the words of the president, play “small ball” – that is, kill valuable time on marginal issues. At the Federal Communications Commission, small ball is sometimes elevated to an Olympic sport, with all manner of slights meted out in those creatively subtly ways for which bureaucrats are famous.
Last Friday, the FCC was at its small-ball best. In an action by the Media Bureau, the FCC said that an April 2002 ruling by then-Media Bureau chief Kenneth Ferree was wrong and vacated. Ferree had effectively told EchoStar it could, under certain conditions, require customers to use two dishes to view all their local TV signals.
The four-page order overturning Ferree five years after the fact was unnecessary, because in late 2004 Congress outlawed the two-dish option, effective 18 months later.
So what was the Media Bureau’s superfluous action really about? Payback, it seems, not about policy.
Just days after Ferree’s order, then-FCC commissioner (and now FCC chairman) Kevin Martin joined FCC Democrat Michael Copps in an eight-page denunciation of allowing EchoStar to split local TV signal between two dishes.
The joint statement was the first time Martin decided to take on then-FCC chairman Michael Powell, a fellow Republican, in public over a ruling by one of his hand-picked bureau chiefs. To FCC watchers, the Martin-Copps statement was real evidence that Martin and Powell had not been getting along.
From then on, the Martin-Powell split grew only worse, capped by Martin’s decision in February 2003 to vote with Copps and Democrat Jonathan Adelstein to frustrate Powell’s effort to toss out phone network unbundling rules hampering the post-bubble, fraud-plagued telecom market.
So it’s always worth remembering that when an agency needs to void one of its own rulings already mooted by a new federal law, there is probably something else going on -- usually, of the small ball variety.
Waiting on FCC's Martin
01/08/2007Martin Backing DTV Transition Trials
03/03/2008Comcast Ready To Take FCC To Court
09/04/2007Copps Made Acting FCC Chairman
01/25/2009
