The Daily Stern
: MORE CROCK FROM THE COMMISSIONER: Michael Powell starts “blogging” at Always On but it’s laughable on so many levels.
Always On is no more a blog than Michael Powell is a blogger. It’s a paper that can’t afford paper and Powell is writing op-eds that no paper would apparently take. It’s just the self-justifying blatherings of a failed, lame-duck bureacrat.
And it’s badly written. How’s this for a lead: “Traditionally, the economic justification for government regulation of an industry was market failure such as monopoly, negative externalities, or unmet social goals.” Negative externalities? Sounds like a zit to me.
But more than anything, it’s just bullshit. Here’s Powell the one-time deregulator still trying to sing out of the deregulation hymnbook still even while he has converted to another church. Ernie Miller neatly takes him apart on technology and deregulation. And, of course, Powell has long since given up defending the deregulation that matters most in America: keeping government out of regulating what its citizens can and can’t say.
If Powell stood on principle, if he truly were the deregulator he tries to look like in his apparently valedictory self-portrait, he would have stood against regulation in media ownership and in technology and in speech. But he didn’t. He was as hypocritical as he was politically inept. And, wow, Always On has him. Lucky them.
: SAY THE F WORD AND PLAY FCC ROULETTE: Ernie Miller also alerts us to Broadcasting & Cable coverage of a speech by the FCC enforcement chief who first ruled that Bono’s F word was OK and who was overruled by the FCC and who now tries to argue that the F word isn’t really outlawed. Go ahead. Say it on the air. He dares you.
