The accidental arbiter
FCC Chairman Michael Powell, atop an agency built to handle bandwidth and licensing, finds himself in a pivotal role for an election year: point man in a values clash over free speech and indecency.
He doesn't wear a robe or wield a gavel, but when Michael Powell holds forth on subjects ranging from antitrust laws to indecency, he often sounds more like a judge than a regulator. Comments about the Founding Fathers and the First Amendment tumble from his lips.
Like his father, the secretary of State, Mr. Powell commands attention when he speaks. The eldest child and only son of Alma and Colin Powell, he is not quite flashy fodder for the cover of People magazine. But as head of the Federal Communications Commission, his pop-culture footprint is large. An unelected official, he's in charge of regulating what people see and hear, and how. His purview ranges from new technology - using the Internet as a telephone, for example - to old debates with new heat, such as how much profanity seeps into TV programs.
Powell is talkative - even his own family says so - and often funny, reflecting an easy-going upbringing. A self-described technology fiend, he owns all the latest gadgets, listening to classical music or Outkast on his iPod. His management style? Military- influenced, of course. As his critics know, the man is decisive. He slips easily into that robe-and-gavel mode, reflecting more than a decade of studying law and free-market philosophies.
Yet he can be a reluctant judge. If it were up to Powell, his agency would be making headlines these days for helping to spread broadband from sea to shining sea, offering people in big cities and rural areas access to the means of transmission now driving digital communication. Instead - thanks to Howard Stern, Janet Jackson, and an election season that keeps pushing "values" to the fore - he spends more time lately focused on indecency.
Even if Mr. Stern weren't pounding the drum almost daily on his radio show about what he calls Powell's political motives (Powell is a Republican) or unequal treatment of violators, complaints from the public might make the issue too significant to ignore. In a talk last month at the annual gathering of the National Association of Broadcasters in Las Vegas, Powell said the number of indecency complaints received by the FCC jumped from 14,000 in 2002 to nearly 540,000 in the first four months of this year.
The subject appears to temper Powell's humor and energy, but not his prudence. Powell cites the First Amendment concerns involved in regulating what people say on the airwaves - no matter how others may react to their words.
In an interview in his Washington office, Powell says that when Thomas Jefferson wrote that government should not hinder free speech, "it was essentially a command to government to always be uncomfortable when it is in the [realm] of 'content.' " What he'd like is for broadcasters to do more self-policing. Until then, he says, he will enforce the law Congress has set before him.
As he told attendees in Las Vegas: "Laws can be specific, bright-line rules, or they can be standards that require interpretation and judgment."
Back in Washington, Powell doesn't back down. He says he has no lack of confidence about what the commission is doing about indecency, such as imposing steep fines on some carriers of Stern's show. "I've felt quite comfortable with virtually every decision we've made in this area. But ... you listen to the debate, and [people] act as if I'm just sort of on my own discretion doing all this stuff, and I always bristle a little about that," he says. "Any chairman in my position who wouldn't enforce these [indecency] cases is in dereliction of their responsibilities, plain and simple."
