Cable Ties
or Kevin Martin agonisties. How has FCC Chairman Kevin Martin managed to get nearly everyone mad at him? Everyone everyone. The Cable industry. His fellow republican commission members, particularly commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate. The two Democrats, who normally view him with suspicion and are looking prescient at the moment. Commissioner Adelstein lent his voice to republican concerns that Martin may have again been having the FCC hide or obscure contradictory data. Even in Washington where it is often hard to keep the customers satisfied; this is quite a feat
FCC Chief Still Standing, if on Shifting Ground. But why? All this from trying to invoke a Cable Television regulatory threshold referred to as the 70/70 rule. When 70 percent of American households are in neighborhoods wired for cable, and 70 percent of these households do in fact subscribe to cable. Cable starts to come under a regulatory regime more similar to air broadcast television
FCC plan to regulate cable stalls (updated). Language, content, all that. That Chairman Martin was willing to put so many noses out-of-joint, leads me to believe that this was a deliberate strategic nod to social conservatives in an election season. Social Conservatives for all their apparent similarity to libertarians and other small government pretenders are not against the coercive power of the state. Only against the idea that this power is not in their hands.
A small irony is that, in the end the democratic commissioners will likely vote to give him his regulatory powers Round 2 Set in FCC Versus Cable Fight - washingtonpost.com. The populist issue in this is a la carte cable subscriptions - the ability to choose your own assortment of channels for basic cable. This is something the industry cannot abide and fights at all costs. I know little of the cable business model, but it does seem to involve paying for a lot of crap for the handful of shows you do want. It's never been worth it for me. I miss baseball, which has largely disappeared from air broadcast. I envy the extra layer of science and history shows the Discovery and History channels represent. I miss black and white movies, heck, any movies made before the late eighties which broadcast will no longer air. But I miss none of this enough to pay cable subscription fees on a clerk's wages. Too much dross and chaff, not enough yummy gluten.
The Commissioner is the type of individual; however, who seeks to get back on any horse he has fallen off of. He will revisit the cable question and is still aiming at a vote on media consolidation. I hadn't realized this exists in two forms in the current policy framework. There is what is referred to as vertical ownership as well as what is referred to as cross-ownership. The same issues of media consolidation considered differentially . Diversified and minority ownership issues are not currently under consideration*. However, the Commission's most dissenting member, Michael Copps, is willing to discuss why and how all this matters: Salon.com News | FCC commissioner Michael Copps vs. "Big Media".
--* 03Dec07. I need to remember to hold off on any FCC post until the next Monday to see if Liz Berg has put a "Radio News You Can't Use" column up on the WFMU blog. She reviews the same territory in the above post, pointing out that for radio at least diversity and minority ownership concerns is why low power FM non-comericial licenses which I remember as a dead issue are under consideration again, as the FCC casts about for cover. She also notes that the NAB (ever impartial and only technically concerned) is fighting again fighting LPFM on its traditional grounds.
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