by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols

NEAR THE DOOR TO HIS OFFICE in the building where the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is housed, Commissioner Michael J. Copps has posted a framed letter from Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the great chronicler of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Presidency. When Copps joined the FCC in 2001, following a distinguished career on Capitol Hill and in the Clinton Administration, he made a comment about the New Deal's legacy of regulation in the public interest. Schlesinger wrote to express his delight at learning that someone in Washington was still willing to assert the principle that government ought to do more than simply get out of the way and let big business and its lobbies call the shots.

Schlesinger still knows how to spot the heroes.

At a time when the White House and Congress are fully in the grips of corporate America, and when most of the federal bureaucracy seems to be determined to bend every rule to serve the interests of the largest campaign contributors, Copps is raising the flag of public interest. And while he may not be winning every fight, he has already succeeded in changing the character of one of the most significant public policy debates in the history of media regulation. He is a central player in the burgeoning media reform movement that has risen to challenge corporate control over media and media policymaking.

This spring, the FCC is considering proposals to eliminate the handful of longstanding restrictions on media ownership that still remain. The rules under threat prohibit firms from owning newspapers and TV stations in the same town, or cable TV systems and TV stations in the same town, and they limit the number of TV stations and cable TV systems a firm can own nationally. With the largest media firms salivating at the thought of being able to gobble up more properties, and with a Republican majority on the five-member FCC, it appeared until just a few months ago that these media ownership rules were goners. FCC Chairman Michael Powell is an outspoken opponent of such rules and eager to let the so-called free market work its magic. All signs indicated that the deregulation would go through in much the same manner as the sweeping 1996 Telecommunications Act--with virtually no opposition or awareness by the general public. The fix, it would seem, was in.

But the big media had not figured in the Copps effect. Unwilling to roll over and allow the crushing of some of the last vestiges of regulatory protection for real diversity in media, Copps began to raise public interest concerns with a force not heard on the FCC since Nicholas Johnson challenged the corporate line back in the 1960s or Clifford Durr battled the networks as a progressive New Dealer in the 1940s. Before rules governing ownership are eliminated, Copps said, the commission should go out and hear what the American people think about one company owning most of their sources of information, about the potential loss of local content in their newspapers, on radio, and on television, and about the even broader question of whether allowing a handful of corporations to dominate American media might pose a threat to democracy itself.

To understand how remarkable Copps's questioning of the commission's course is, consider what had been status quo for the FCC. Recall that former FCC Chairman William Kennard acknowledged that before he took the job in 1997 he was advised by a longtime FCC member that his job was "to referee fights between the very wealthy and the very, very wealthy," with the public entirely uninvolved in the FCC's affairs. For most FCC members most of the time, the purpose of the commission has been to see that communications industries are profitable, and that the largest corporations and lobbying firms bid to hire former commissioners once their terms expired.

Enter Copps, a Democrat who served as an Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Trade Development in the Clinton Administration. Copps has taken the law establishing the FCC literally. "That phrase, 'serving the public interest, convenience, and necessity,' appears 112 times in the statute. So I think Congress was serious about us serving the public interest," the commissioner says. "When you're talking about something like the airwaves, it's not just something of interest between different companies, between the wealthy and the very wealthy, because those airwaves, in fact, belong not to those companies but to the people of the United States of America."

Linda Foley, president of the Newspaper Guild, which represents print journalists, says Copps has almost singlehandedly changed the course of the debate. "Commissioner Copps has made a remarkable effort to bring the people who work in media, the people who create music and film, the people who read and listen to and watch media, back into the discussion," says Foley. "What he has done is just remarkable."

Over the past six months the man who spent fifteen years on the staff of Senator Ernest Hollings, Democrat of South Carolina, has done everything in his power to prevent the FCC from scrapping these media ownership regulations without broad public participation. He has met consistent opposition from Powell, who is clear about his eagerness to implement the rule changes quickly and quietly. As chairman, Powell holds the power to call for a vote whenever he pleases, and he may eventually get his way, but Copps has proven to be a formidable foe. Citizen groups have launched a series of historically unprecedented media ownership hearings across the nation this winter and spring, which have forced FCC members, including Powell, to hear from interests other than big media. Copps has been a regular at the hearings, a guest on talk radio, a contributor of columns to national magazines, and an all-around pitchman for public participation in what was supposed to be a closed debate.

Powell, on the other hand, wanted to gather commentary using a standard procedure so obscure that, even when monumental issues are being weighed, no more than a small fraction of the population has any idea what is going on. "We shouldn't just sit here and decide that we're going to have a procedure on, say, media ownership, and we'll just print that up in the federal register, and ergo we have done our job of telling people what's going on here, and then sit back and wait for the comments to come in," says Copps. "The only comments that will come in then will be from the big businesses and maybe some of the better-funded consumer groups."

Copps is not categorically opposed to bigness. "I'm not saying that media consolidation is always bad, or always good, or whatever," the commissioner explains. "I've read perfectly plausible stories where media concentration in a particular area, one station going in and buying up another, has maybe kept that area from going dark, or not being served." But Copps is taken aback by the magnitude of the proposed rule changes. "My question is, how do you put that genie back in the bottle? In point of fact, you cannot. Once those caps are lifted, you won't be able to undo that. So what happens then? That's why I say it is so important and that it's going to affect the media landscape for a long, long time to come."

What has happened to radio, the one media industry that had its ownership rules greatly relaxed under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, weighs heavily on Copps's mind. "As a result of that, we have at least 34 percent fewer radio station owners in the United States than we had back in 1996," says Copps. "So we have the top ten companies basically controlling two-thirds of the audience and two-thirds of the broadcasting revenues. And I'm told the top three control 60 percent of the stations in the top 100 markets in the United States."

Such consolidation has a negative impact. "A good argument can be made that as a result of this consolidation we've got a lot more in the way of standardized, homogenized programming," says Copps. "We have less locally originated programming and more material that comes out of wherever corporate headquarters is. That has some pretty serious effects. We all read these stories about talented young folks trying to make a future for themselves and get some airtime for their music, and they can't get on because the local station is playing some playlist that comes out of corporate headquarters where they have decided what songs are going to be played and who is going to win. Now the question is, do we visit upon other parts of the media world, particularly television, that which has been visited upon radio?"

As a result of pressure from Copps and others--including thousands of e-mails opposing deregulation from that fraction of the population aware of the public comment period--Powell agreed to schedule one official public hearing in Richmond, Virginia, in late February.

There, in what is becoming an increasingly common scene at FCC functions or meetings of the commercial broadcasters, hundreds of protesters demonstrated against Powell's mad dash to deregulate the airwaves. Although members of Congress and governors from around the country have suggested that the FCC needs to hold similar official hearings in other states, Powell has refused to countenance or participate in any further official hearings.

But that hasn't stopped Copps from dragging many of the commissioners to unofficial hearings. The first of these was held at Columbia University in January, with four of the five FCC members, including Powell, in attendance. Several other hearings are on tap, including ones in Seattle, Detroit, Burlington, Vermont, Washington, D.C., Arizona, North Carolina, and Iowa.

Copps has faced a problem in promoting greater public involvement. "I'm relying on the media to inform America," Copps says. "I'm doing everything I can, too, but in the final analysis it's the media that is going to have to get the story about these decisions that are important to every American. Yet some of these media properties are owned by companies that have a vested interest in the outcome."

Copps says he has not been "bowled over" by the current press coverage. At the Columbia hearing in New York City, not a single commercial broadcaster covered the event, even in passing. The noncommercial community broadcaster Pacifica, on the other hand, gave it live gavel-to-gavel coverage. "This is still, in my mind, very much an inside-the-Beltway issue," says Copps. "It has not become one where the country is really plugged into it and knows what's going on here. That's because the country doesn't really know. If it did know, I think a lot of people would be vitally interested in the outcome."

Copps has located some crucial allies in his campaign to generate public discussion of media concentration. In Congress, more than thirty members of the House have signed a letter advising Powell and the FCC to generate more research and to encourage much greater public participation in the process--and to slow down its rush to scrap or alter the ownership rules. In the Senate, Ohio Republican Mike DeWine, the chair of a key Judiciary Committee subcommittee that deals with anti-trust issues, signed a letter with the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, Wisconsin's Herb Kohl, that reminds the FCC that Congress is concerned about diversity of ownership in media.

That concern boiled over at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the telephone industry in mid-January, where Democratic and Republican Senators grilled FCC members on ownership issues to such an extent that Powell acknowledged for the first time that he was concerned about the loss of diversity in radio ownership following the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

"Interestingly, this was supposed to be a hearing solely on telecommunications, what was going on between the Bell telephone companies and their competitors, and what were the rules of competition going to be," recalls Copps. "We weren't into that hearing two minutes, I'll bet, before one Senator after another started asking about media consolidation and what's going on down there at the Commission. Equally interesting, it wasn't just from the Democratic side, but it was also from the Republican side. This is not a partisan issue. This is a bipartisan issue or better, a nonpartisan issue. We had Senator Hollings and Senator Dorgan on the Democratic side and Senator Lott and Senator Hutchison and others on the Republican side. All of them were expressing some concern about the pace of consolidation in the media world and what might be the ultimate implications of that."

Since that hearing, Commerce Committee Chair John McCain, Republican of Arizona, has held one hearing focused on media ownership and announced plans to hold several more. "I'm delighted to see him asking these questions," Copps says of the man who challenged George W. Bush for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2000, and who had been seen as an ally of Powell. "He is certainly doing his part to try and spark a national debate."

Perhaps most important, Copps has found allies at the FCC itself. In December 2002, after a long, and at times, difficult confirmation struggle, Jonathan Adelstein became the second Democrat on the FCC. Adelstein jumped into the debate with an early January speech to the Future of Music Coalition conference in Washington, where he echoed Copps's concerns. "At what point does consolidation undermine the public interest?" Adelstein asked. He answered his own question, saying, "Congress's relaxation of the rules on radio consolidation has been the canary in the coal mine, testing whether it is safe to go in before miners dare enter. The miners in this case are all the consumers affected by FCC rules that govern the ownership of television, radio, cable, and newspapers. The FCC better carefully consider the health of that canary before we proceed further, because changes to the FCC's media ownership rules potentially could alter the media landscape as much or more than the 1996 actions by Congress changed the radio industry."

A second possible, though hardly certain, ally is Kevin Martin, a thirty-six-year-old Republican appointee who worked on the Bush Presidential campaign. Martin led the opposition to Powell's plan to deregulate the telephone companies in February, forming a successful voting bloc with Copps and Adelstein against the agenda of some of the most powerful telecommunications corporations in the world. Martin has, as well, been open to Copps's call for more debate on the media ownership rule changes and has been willing to travel to some of the public hearings.

For some time, there has been talk that Powell may be reluctant to push ahead with a radical deregulation if he had to do so on a 3-to-2 vote, especially with so many members of Congress announcing their opposition of the process. But now there is the possibility that Powell cannot even count on getting a majority of the votes.

Control over the media may be finally becoming a political issue in the United States. If that is the case, then the days of government monopoly licenses, policies, and subsidies doled out in a corrupt manner to massive corporations with almost no public opposition may be coming to an end. That is the hopeful prospect that one man's determination to reassert the public interest has created, a prospect that may lead us all to look back upon Michael Copps's fight to bring the American people into the debate over media as the point where that debate got real.

Says Copps: "I'm trying to raise as much ruckus as I can about it, because I do think it is that important."

-- Robert W. McChesney is research professor at the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

-- John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. They are co-authors, most recently, of "Our Media, Not Theirs" (Seven Stories Press, 2002). The authors have been active in efforts to prevent the loosening of FCC regulations on media ownership.