LLFCC ran into Dan Isett last week at the Federal Communication Commission's Consumer Advisory Committee meeting, on which Isett, the PTC's Director of Corporate and Government Affairs, sits as a member. Ten minutes later we were still talking about policy. So I called Dan today at his PTC office in Alexandria, Virginia, to get the conversation on the record. Turns out he's been reading my blog . . .

LLFCC: Dan, as you know, in June the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals overturned FCC indecency citations against Fox TV, arguing that the agency's stance against so-called "fleeting expletives" was overbroad. I know that you guys didn't like that decision. What do you think Congress or the FCC should do about it?

Dan Isett of the PTC

Dan Isett: Well, the decision was made on very narrow administrative grounds, so essentially if the Congress were to simply say 'no, what we meant by' broadcast indecency included things like profane language at the times of day when children are most likely to be in the audience, then that would render this decision moot, and that's something that we would like to see the Congress do.

LLFCC: Sooner or later the FCC is going to make a decision on the proposed XM/Sirius merger, what do you think they should do?

On September 12th, the Federal Communications Commission granted closed-captioning exemptions for two religious broadcasters, a fairly rare occurrence until recently. But this decision went further, noting that in future cases if a non-profit demonstrates that it receives no compensation from video program distributors and that "in the absence of an exemption, may terminate or substantially curtail its programming," the FCC will favor a closed captioning exemption request.

The American Association of People with Disabilities quickly denounced the decision. Massachusetts Congressmember Edward Markey sent an open letter to FCC Chair Kevin Martin expressing his concern.

"Taken as a whole," Markey wrote to Martin, "the Commission's action in this matter appears to have the effect of promulgating a change in its rules, specifically the creation of a new category of presumptive exemption from closed captioning rules."

Following last week's release of FCC data indicating that the United States continues to trail behind Western Europe in mobile phone penetration, LLFCC contacted Princeton sociologist Paul Starr to get his take on the problem. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction for his work on American medicine, Starr's most recent book, The Creation of the Media, compares the evolution of media and national development in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France from the 17th century onward.

Starr's work makes him the perfect candidate to explore this present day situation. Why then, LLFCC asked him via email, does the U.S. find itself following the pack today? Starr replies:

"As you know, the U.S. has lagged in wireless for a long time relative to Europe; this is not a new development. It seems to me that at least three factors were responsible for the disparity.

1. While the U.S. favored competing firms with competing standards, the Europeans set standards that had two effects: a) Wireless service worked better across the continent; and b) Wireless manufacturers were able to achieve economies of scale and cut prices more quickly. This is an instance where competition did not serve the goal of a rapid roll-out of a technology.

For months industry and children's advocacy groups have been commenting on a Joint Agreement that would bring new rules to children's TV programming in the digital era. The agreement was the result of years of negotiations between big media and a consortium of child advocacy groups, including Children Now, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the National Parent Teacher Association. On the other side of the table sat Turner Broadcasting, Time-Warner, Viacom, NBC, Discovery, CBS, and Disney.

Former FCC Commissioner Gloria Tristani has played an active role in these negotiations for quite some time. On August 11th Tristani, now with the Benton Foundation, met with an FCC legal advisor and asked the Commission to ratify the document.

LLFCC asked Tristani what is at stake in these negotiations.

Tristani: What's at stake is how are we going to serve our children and our youth over the new digital channels and airwaves. One of the things that we have tried to do as members of the Children's Media Advocacy Coalition is to make sure that children's educational and informational needs are met by the new capacity of digital channels that has been gifted to these TV stations.

In January of this year a group of New Yorkers decided that they'd had it with unsolicited phone calls, particularly calls from Clear Channel station WLTW. The station ran a prerecorded message campaign that urged land line owners to tune into the frequency for Motown, Elton John, and prizes.

So they filed a class action lawsuit against the giant. "These calls are an intrusion," their attorney Todd C. Bank told LL-FCC. "What is worse is that, unlike a regular telemarketing call, you can't tell the prerecorded message to please take you off their list. Imagine if everybody did this? You wouldn't be able to own a phone."

Bank's suit charged that the calls violated the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act. But the judge hearing the case noted that the Federal Communications Commission had made an exception to the law. The Commission decided that such messages were acceptable if their purpose was "merely to invite a consumer to listen or to view a broadcast." rather than to sell a product.

The judge, citing a legal principle called the "Chevron deference," said he would go along with the FCC's interpretation of the statute, albeit with misgivings. "I have serious questions as to whether this is the type of phone call Congress intended to exempt when it granted such authority to the FCC," he noted.

250 people attended a "Town Meeting on the Future of the Media" held at Old Dominion University in Virginia on Thursday, March 30th. There they heard FCC Commissioner Michael Copps talk about the government agency's controversial proposal to relax media ownership limits, a plan which Copps opposes. The event was co-sponsored by Old Dominion and Free Press, a media reform group.

"I believe that if we roll up our sleeves," Copps told the gathering, "all of us – workers, artists, elected officials, regulators, consumers, citizens everywhere – can settle this issue of who is going to control our media and for what purposes, and we can settle it in favor of airwaves of, by and for the people of this great country."

Two key questions stand out among the many that the FCC faces. Should the Commission drop its ban on media "duopoloies"?—a company owning two or more TV stations in the same market. And should the FCC rescind its prohibition on a firm owning a newspaper and a TV station in the same market?

Nearly two years ago, a small band of grassroots radio activists astounded the telecommunications world by convincing a U.S. Federal Court to strike down the Federal Communications Commission's July 2003 decision to significantly relax media ownership limits in the United States. In a controversial series of rulings, the FCC made it easier for companies to create TV "duopolies"—two or more TV stations owned by the same firm in the same market, to own TV stations and newspapers in the same commercial region, and to control TV and radio stations in a similar manner. The Commission also allowed TV networks to reach 45 percent of the national market; the previous limit had been 35 percent.

The months leading up to the FCC's ruling had been filled with impassioned public hearings across the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Americans wrote to the FCC to express their fears about "media consolidation." Finally a group of media reformers led by the Prometheus Project, an advocacy group for low power FM stations, sued the Commission.