As he stews in his own political juice, with Congress breathing down his neck, FCC Chairman Mikey Powell can use all the friends he can get. One would assume those friends would include the business/finance community, seeing as how Powell’s a fervent acolyte for their religion.
Think again: BusinessWeek magazine published this piece online yesterday, which is a pretty straightforward indictment of Powell, ending with,
“Powell refused to make a public case for the merits of his proposal. Then, he skewed the data to try to fool people. Plenty of other telecommunications policy experts have the political skills to handle the FCC job less contentiously than Powell. He should leave, before he’s shown the door.”
Note BusinessWeek’s beef with Powell is not with the fact that his ideas suck: the problem is Mikey bungled selling them. BusinessWeek is owned by the McGraw-Hill Companies; among McGraw-Hill’s properties is Standard & Poor’s, keepers of the S&P stock indices.
In late and unrelated news that still deserves a mention:
—The Prometheus Radio Project’s successful delay of the FCC’s media ownership rules revision has forced the FCC to freeze all pending commercial radio station applications and modifications. That’s bound to have pissed off somebody in the radio industry – an added bonus!
—From Future of Music Coalition co-founder Jenny Toomey’s neglected web site, on her experience testifying in front of the Senate Commerce Committee earlier this spring, where she sat at the same table with NAB chief Eddie Fritts and Clear Channel daddy Lowry Mays: “For those of you who aren’t familiar with Lowery (sic) and Eddie I can just say that this is the equivalent of sitting at the same table with not one, but two, Darth Vaders.”
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