Michael Powell and the proponents of deregulation say, "Look, if we don't do this, if we don't change the ownership rules, the courts will" -- and that federal courts have already struck down a number of the current ownership limits.

Well, it's the same crowd. The courts we're talking about here are made up of just a handful of people who are throwing parties in their Georgetown mansions for the commissioners who are casting the votes. It's the same club. It's not some kind of independent, objective authority we're talking about.

You seem to see much larger forces at work here.

I'm seeing democracy at work. People are getting what they voted for or what they let other people vote for.

But back to Powell's argument -- how as chairman would you handle this differently?

Any competent appellate lawyer could build a case for media diversity and win it in any fair court in the country. Period.

So you don't think the FCC has doggedly pursued a legal challenge?

They haven't even taken it to the Supreme Court. When the Court of Appeals votes the right way -- pun intended -- then this FCC doesn't take the case to the Supreme Court, which is a much closer call on all issues. They don't ever try.

If you were chairman would you have taken them to the Supreme Court?

Big matters should go to the big court.

Back to 1995 when the Telecom Act was pending: A lot of the ownership limits about to be implemented were part of that proposed legislation, correct?

When Newt Gingrich was running the House of Representatives, effective in the fall of 1994, he called all the media owners together in a room down on Capitol Hill, and according to what people who were there told me, he told them he'd give them relaxed rules allowing media concentration in exchange for favorable coverage. Now I wasn't there, but that's what they said they understood he meant.

But in the end, those provisions for cross-ownership for newspaper and television, they didn't survive the Telecom Act, right?

In the end, President Clinton allowed only the radio industry to be consolidated. Not because he wanted it, but because he used up his political capital fighting consolidation in the other media groups.

And why was he opposed to cross-ownership for newspaper and television?

Because he believed all different points of view should have a voice in the mass media. That's not a very radical idea. In times past, Republicans believed in that also.

Did he have any practical experience in his past that led him to that?

He used to tell people there were only two major media outlets in Arkansas and if they were both owned by the same guy who hated him, then neither he nor any other progressive would ever get their message across.

But this is a different world today. Progressives would be better off going to a Ouija board to channel the spirits of Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell, rather than trying to shake the conservative majority at the FCC. There's no way the three votes there are going to be altered in any way by any kind of popular protest. You can walk the streets of the United States and you will never find a single person who's in favor of more consolidated media, unless by chance you happened to bump into one of Rupert Murdoch's children.

So the vote on Monday will be a culmination of what Newt Gingrich set in motion nearly 10 years ago after the Republican Revolution?

It's the culmination of the attack by the right on the media since the independent media challenged and helped topple Richard Nixon.

But in a sense aren't conservatives suspicious of the media? Why would they want media companies to become more powerful?

Conservatives hope, with some reason, that the major media will be their friends. That's what Dwight Eisenhower was talking about when he warned against the military-industrial complex in his last speech before leaving office. If Dwight Eisenhower were alive today he'd be warning us about the dangers of the military-industrial-media complex.

The concern was that that complex would not be a separate stand-alone one, and that it would soon morph into a quasi-governmental one?

Ever since the invention of the printing press, governments have tried to make an ally out of owners of the means of information distribution. That's as old a story as when the powers that be tried to suppress Gutenberg's Bible. Not because they didn't believe in the Bible, but because they didn't believe everyone should be able to get one.

This is a 600-year-old story. It's not a new story. But it's news to the United States that one side should get this close to that goal.

When did the FCC in effect get out of the regulation business?

I don't think it's out of the business, at least not until the June 2 vote. It's regulation to insist on market structures that provide multiple voices. That's good, healthy regulation. We don't need regulations that tell people what to say. But antitrust policy has always been used to promote diversity in all industries. And there's never been any industry where that's been more important than the media.

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