Revolution in Cyberia

There's a Pulitzer Prize book in this, I'm telling you. And I'm not kidding." Reed Hundt, the slim, boyish - and at this moment shirt-sleeved - forty-seven-year-old chairman of the Federal Communications Commission leans forward in his easy chair in his M Street Washington office. "This is the end of television as we know it - and the reinvention of television," he declares earnestly. "And not only is this not being reported - right now it's not even the subject of imaginative thinking" in the general press. He's talking about the startling new digital broadcast TV systems that will soon create six or seven over-the-air television "channels" for every one now in existence. Huge uncertainties abound: How will this vast new electronic real estate be utilized? By whom? Under what conditions? With how much government input? How will the public's best interests be served - if at all?

 And beyond digital TV, for all its revolutionary importance, lurk - Hundt fervently insists - a cornucopia of other communications issues that remain dark mysteries to the public. "I've always thought news meant telling people new things. And this is about something new. We are all struggling, everyone involved in this area, struggling to find words to describe the new things, metaphors that work to communicate rather than close the imagination. It's not easy, but there are Pulitzers to win for those people who first figure out how to communicate about communications."

For TV watchers, the earth is shifting tectonically under their feet (or under their couches) and hardly one in a million knows it, according to frustrated regulators at the FCC who are charged with refereeing a titanic, three-way tug-of-war between powerful factions in the broadcast, cable, and telephone businesses. They find themselves at the storm center, as never before in the commission's history, of winds that will ventilate virtually every living room and boardroom in America. The emerging infostructure is "the greatest story in the history of communications since the invention of the printing press," Hundt has declared. (By the end of 1996, telecommunications will account for one-sixth of the U.S. economy, according to the Council of Economic Advisors.)

On the one hand you have Hundt and his mentors, President Clinton and Vice President Gore, who harbor a utopian vision of new jobs, lower prices, and better education once the new paradigm is operative. For their part, broadcasters, cablers, and telephone folk are clashing furiously with buckler and broadsword under the tattered banner "All We Want Is A Fair Advantage Over Our Competitors" - while at the same time forging strategic alliances (sometimes with one another). Billions are being spent, and tens of billions budgeted, for a so-called "global information infrastructure" of which no one - least of all the public - can discern the ultimate shape. The term Information Superhighway (coined by Alvin Toffler and promoted by Gore) has long outlived its pertinency: a stingy, old-think metaphor that doesn't nearly express the oceanic sweep and interconnectedness of the New Cyberia - computers, satellites, wired and wireless telephony, interactive cable, digitally compressed broadcast signals, data transmissio and "video dial tones" that can produce "video on demand" to suit the most voracious information and/or entertainment consumer twenty-four hours a day.

 At the precise intersection of all those vectors stands the lanky figure of Reed Hundt - unknown inside the Beltway until his appointment as boss of the FCC. (He did go to prep school with Gore and law school with both Bill and Hillary Clinton.) When he took over the commission, he was "an unsung Latham & Watkins litigator," as The American Lawyer described him, but now "has the power to change the world. Is he a new age visionary? Or is he just smarter - and more arrogant - than the average bureaucrat?" Without question, the magazine concluded, he is "now the most powerful lawyer in Washington."

Created by the Communications Act of 1934, the FCC now oversees 21,000 broadcast stations, cable television, the telephone industry, land mobile services, private and citizens band radio, and microwave, cellular, satellite, and fiber optic communications. It grew from 233 employees and a budget of $1 million to a staff of 2,000 and a proposed 1996 budget of $222.6 million. It's currently encamped, however, at the most precarious crossroads in all its history, pinned down by cannon fire from the Republican-controlled Congress, some of whose members are committed to wounding it, perhaps fatally. Indeed, Hundt has recently found himself on the short end of votes at the five-member commission, unable to depend on the support even of his two fellow Democrats, the FCC veteran James Quello and Susan Ness, who have often sided with Republicans Andrew Barrett and Rachelle Chong.

As soon as he was appointed in 1993, Reed Hundt charged from the chute like a Barcelona bull - or perhaps a new age New Dealer, itching for hands-on contact with telecommunications issues. Hundt projected himself as the polar opposite of Ronald Reagan's first FCC chairman, Mark Fowler, who once decreed that television was nothing more than a "toaster with pictures," and deserved about the same level of government regulation. Hundt's first major initiative was to roll back cable subscription rates an average of 7 percent (after an earlier 10 percent cut by the Bush FCC), a move that infuriated the cable industry and also threw a monkey wrench (the participants bellowed) into a proposed $26 billion merger between cable giant Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI) and the Bell Atlantic regional phone company - a merger that had been perceived as the first giant step toward constructing the Infobahn. Then Hundt mused publicly about the perils of TV violence, and embarked on stricter enforcement of the Children's Televisn Act, which mandates that stations provide some regular educational and informational shows for kids. Those smoke signals set broadcasters to grumbling. Cable executives accused him of favoring the Baby Bells over cable. TCI's John Malone declared that the only way to launch the information age was to "shoot Hundt. Don't let him do any more damage." (He later apologized.) Time Warner c.e.o. Gerald Levin criticized the FCC's "Soviet-style regulation." There were also those who felt the FCC had done too little. Eli Noam, director of the Institute for Tele-Information at Columbia University, complained, "They will tell you lots of things, but it's a lot of p.r. It's communications by after-dinner speech."

Everything was turned upside down with the arrival of Newt Gingrich and the Republican sweep of the House and Senate in 1994. Hands-on was out and hands-off was in - at least in Congress. The unthinkable began to be thought - and discussed. Senator Larry Pressler, the new chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, which has oversight responsibility for the FCC, said the commission is "heading in exactly the wrong direction" and that the Clinton administration's activist bent has "ballooned both FCC staff and budget." Congressman Jack Fields, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance, trumpeted his intention to "dramatically reform" the FCC. The right-wing Heritage Foundation on March 22 issued "A Policy Maker's Guide to Deregulating Telecommunications. . . . Is the FCC Worth Its Cost?" advising that ". . . Congress should not miss the rare opportunity presented by this year's deregulatory legislation to eliminate the FCC once and for all." On May 30, the conservative Progress and Fedom Foundation - which is closely linked to Gingrich - called for eliminating the FCC and replacing it with an "Office of Communications Policy," which would have drastically less authority. Media theorist George Gilder earlier warned that if the U.S. telecommunications industry isn't totally deregulated, the country risks losing up to $2 trillion of new business in the 1990s. And Speaker Gingrich, in a conversation with editors of the authoritative trade journal Broadcasting & Cable, offered these words, which rattled the timbers at 1919 M Street:

I was at a dinner one night and I asked fifteen c.e.o.s of telecommunications companies if we would be better off if [the FCC] were abolished, and all fifteen raised their hands. Every one of them said the FCC is slowing down the development of the twenty-first century, that it costs us billions of dollars and thousands of jobs in the cellular industry and that we would be better off and would dominate the world market better and create more jobs for Americans if we did not have the current FCC structure. I was stunned at the intensity and the unanimity that the FCC is a major block to our getting into the twenty-first century.

Those executives obviously made a big impression on the speaker because by late May, he was declaring he'd like to "phase out the FCC in three to five years at the most." There's a massive automobile industry in the U.S., he pointed out, "but no Department of Automobiles."

Against that turbulent backdrop, the most far-reaching telecommunications-reform legislation in history is currently wending its tortuous way through Congress and may be on the president's desk before summer's end. When and if it becomes law, the FCC will be the enforcer. The House and Senate versions, as proposed, contain some ticking time bombs for journalists and have also triggered major concerns among consumer advocates fearful that the tattered remnants of the public trusteeship standard - requiring broadcasters to serve the "public interest, convenience, and necessity" as a condition of doing business - will be jettisoned and never seen again. At the heart of the new legislation is the not-so-revolutionary, but never fully tested, notion that competition beats the heck out of regulation as a means of assuring the greatest economic good for the greatest number.

 The law may decree that:

 * regulations be repealed banning the ownership by one company of a newspaper and a TV station in the same market

* cable operators be allowed into the telephone business and telephone companies permitted to transmit video signals

 * broadcast companies be freed up to own cable systems, and vice-versa

* telephone companies be allowed to buy cable systems in their region

 * limitations be lifted on how many radio stations and eased on how many TV stations one company can own

 * rates be deregulated for service beyond basic cable

* broadcast stations' license terms be increased to ten years (from TV's five and radio's seven)

 * broadcasters be allowed to own more than one television station in a market.

Some of those proposals, say consumer advocates, imperil the practice of sound journalism. "I think there's a great deal of danger in this legislation," says Bradley Stillman, Telecommunications Policy Director of the Consumer Federation of America. "If one entity owns the local newspaper, the television station, the cable system, and the telephone company, any reporter for that newspaper or TV station who does a story not pleasing to the company could be in serious difficulty. I think that threat is very real." Consolidation and concentration of media companies, in other words, can choke robust journalism. Corporate barons are notoriously uninterested in investigative reporting, either about themselves or about peers with whom they share boardrooms.

 The new law might "radically affect the news environment as we know it," says Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Media Education in Washington. "The issue of media structure is an unseen cancer on the democratic body politic and it's going to get worse." Historically, the merger of media companies has meant cutbacks in investigative reporting, he says, as those companies try to find economies of scale. Instead of the hoped-for competition "you'll see more mergers and more single owners of various media in a single market, which does not bode well for diversity. The stakes are much higher now, and journalists themselves are not looking at it. They're keeping their eyes closed and their fingers crossed hoping that this brave new world will somehow work out OK. It won't."

Suppose, for example, that:

* a reporter for one of the newly emerging all-news local cable channels uncovered shady dealings by its parent cable operator;

 * or that a newsperson at a local paper - owned by a TV station in town - learned exclusively that the station's manager was paying kickbacks to advertising agencies;

* or that a TV station's news department found out that the local cable system - with whom it shared a corporate parent - was juggling its rates to hide price increases to its subscribers;

* or that a network news division learned that its sibling cable systems were installing shoddy and perhaps dangerous materials in subscribers' homes.

Those hypotheticals, along with a score of others easily imaginable, might put journalists on the rack in their desire to do an honest job without undermining the companies they work for. Increasingly the landscape is becoming a minefield of such hazards, and journalists are having a harder and harder time figuring out where they can safely walk. If Time magazine found cause for an expos? of AT&T, would it endanger a possible mega-deal between Time Warner and AT&T, thereby disgruntling the shareholders of both companies? And what if a reporter from either WNYW-TV in New York or the New York Post - both owned by Rupert Murdoch under a waiver of the cross-ownership rules - should turn up major improprieties at MCI Communications Inc., which recently forged a $2 billion alliance with Murdoch's News Corp.? Or found hanky-panky at British Telecommunications, which owns 20 percent of MCI? The iron filings are forming fascinating patterns around fewer and fewer magnets. (Or magnates.)

 With regard to much of this, the FCC is an interested bystander. But decisions are being made in Congress as well as at the FCC, says Andrew Schwartzman, executive director of the Media Access Project, that will "dramatically affect civic discourse for the coming generations, and the public is remarkably ill-informed and inadequately involved in this decision-making process." He laments "the failure of journalism as a whole to understand the importance of these issues and to explain them to their audience." Or even to apprehend their own ignorance about them. "The biggest shortcoming of American journalism," Schwartzman insists, "is coverage of itself."

The consequences for the public from this information gap are serious. A real danger exists, for example, that the U.S. can become a nation of informational haves and have-nots, as the new interactive cable and telephone gimcrackery becomes widely available in the next ten years. Those cyber-age systems will be wonderfully versatile and potentially enriching in their capacity to bring vast amounts of information, time-saving services, and entertainment straight into the home. They will not, however, come free of charge. Schools, libraries, museums, and hospitals that can't afford high user fees will be denied the full benefits of these miraculous new tools unless rules are written to control the tolls on the infohighway. Similarly, ethnic and racial minorities may be voiceless spectators in an otherwise informationally rumbustious world. Seemingly trifling matters such as the proposed lengthening of TV stations' license terms from five to ten years could affect the public negatively if those stations feel emldened to shirk their legal obligation to offer educational shows for kids. A public well aware of such potholes on the road to our cyber-future could make a difference.

Another example is the unprecedented auction the FCC is conducting - the selling off of great chunks of the nation's airwaves to companies planning to use them for wireless telephone and computer networks. By the time they are finished the total is expected to reach an astonishing $10 billion, a windfall that goes straight to the government's piggy bank, possibly to help decrease the federal deficit.

Surely, the most daunting bit of business before the FCC this year and for years to come is what to do about digital television. That's the hugely promising alternative to analog television (the system your TV set uses now) which originally was imagined as a conduit for high-definition TV but also permits the beaming of six or seven channels on the same bandwidth that currently sends only one. It's one of the most fantastical and dizzying prospects in broadcasting's seventy-five-year history. And it holds immense potential for enriching consumers' information bill of fare. For example, a digital TV-caster could simultaneously beam an all-news channel, an all-kids' channel, live sports events, a movie, a shopping channel, or anything else he could peddle to viewers and advertisers. He might transmit, in the pre-dawn hours, a half-dozen newspapers into the computers of subscribers, and even simulcast customized news programs for specific geographic areas within his signal range.

 The FCC expects to approve the technical standard for digital TV by the end of August and when that happens manufacturers will start making television sets that can receive it. "Those TV's will hit the market at the beginning of 1997," Hundt predicts. "That means we have eighteen months in which to reinvent the broadcast industry and lay out the blueprint for a revolution."

 That process raises big questions: What strings - if any - ought to be attached to these extraordinarily valuable new channels? What covenants, what promises? Should the new homesteaders be required to do public service as part of the deal: news programs, kids' shows, community affairs shows, and perhaps even free air time for candidates for public office? Should that fertile electronic farmland be auctioned to the highest bidders or simply handed over to the incumbent TV station owners? If TV stations do have first call, should they pay for the new channels? How much? And what happens to those vast stretches of vacated analog spectrum when broadcasters migrate completely to digital?

The old-line TV people, of course, feel that the new channels belong to them gratis as their birthright, and they'll bring the siege guns of the National Association of Broadcasters to bear on the Congress and the FCC to argue their case. One FCC official speaking on background recalls he was recently at a meeting where a TV station owner said: "Oh, sure, the politicians are talking about selling these new channels instead of giving them to us, but we'll send our people over to Capitol Hill and put an end to that." Broadcasters are such a powerful lobby in Washington, said the FCC official, because they give air time on their local news shows to members of Congress. "And of course many newspapers around the country own television stations and so they have a vested interest in the outcome," he argues. "So you have here a huge story involving tens of billions of dollars - huge implications, the future of television at stake - and almost no one is reporting it."

"Journalists don't understand what the FCC is," says Newton Minow, President Kennedy's appointee to the chairmanship and the commission's most famous boss for having called television "a vast wasteland" back in 1961. The press has "no conception that everybody in America, every day, is affected by the FCC's decisions, whether they're using a cellular phone, being a ham radio operator, a fireman, a policeman. It's more important than most of the cabinet departments. If I had been given a choice by President Kennedy of being FCC chairman or head of one of the big departments, I would have taken the FCC because you're affecting everybody's life." And how well was he covered those three and a half decades ago? "If I was being very controversial or critical of television, then the press would give it enormous play. If I was working away at something important like communications satellites or educational television, there was either no coverage or it was on page eighty-six." The wasteland quote made big news, Min points out, but day-to-day slogging "is not regarded as worthwhile."

Things haven't changed much, says Reed Hundt. "Most people in the print media have not figured out how to take these issues from the business page to other sections of the newspaper and to write about them in terms that - what Speaker Gingrich calls ïreal people' - can understand." Probably the most fertile source of commentary, he says, has been The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which sports an irregular feature called Telecom. "They are cycling through their stable of revanchist writers."

"Probably the single most frustrating thing is when I read articles in The New York Times and other publications about this field and the reporters have never called," Hundt goes on. "They've never even asked us if we know anything, and sometimes - hold onto your hat - we do!" He admits that many of the impending changes are fiercely complex and defy easy explication. "So I don't feel critical of people in the media. They're not having any easier time than we are."

There are "some very smart people covering us," Hundt's chief of staff, Blair Levin, says. "But their job, particularly in the dailies, is to write an exciting story that's full of conflict and drama." The press's big mistake, he thinks, is too often putting things in terms of sporting events - horse races, winning and losing. "It misses the larger scope of what we're doing because we're not about that. We're about how do you get this incredibly important sector of the economy working in a way that the public interest is served. And that's not decided in a day or in a single decision."

Other coverage, he complains, is "dead wrong." A Los Angeles Times story on the auctions of airwaves stated that the bubble of euphoria about the sales had burst because many of the winning bidders were delaying payment. "It turned out that the number of people not paying was very small, smaller than you'd have at Christie's or Sotheby's," he claims. "The paper was saying, ïOh, my God, the glass is only 95 percent full. It's 5 percent empty! Horrible! Awful! Scandal!' "

Reporters on the FCC beat tend to see things somewhat differently. Some top FCC staffers are "tightfisted" with information, says Jeannine Aversa, who covers the commission for The Associated Press. Extracting from them specifics of so simple a matter as what's on the agenda for the commissioners' monthly open meetings can be tiresome, she maintains; and they prefer that you report on their "cosmic concepts" for "making the world wonderful," more so than on close-to-the-ground, marketbasket effects of their policies. "So there's this constant struggle," she goes on. "They really want reporters to talk about their grand scheme. That gets so academic and so remote from people's lives." Still, she adds, the FCC is into so many new and exciting areas that "it's a great time to cover it."

"There's an oversensitivity at this commission that's unprecedented," laments a beat reporter, requesting anonymity. It's not unusual, says the reporter, to receive a phone call from a high-level staffer claiming inaccuracy and unfairness after a critical news article appears. "When you sit down with them, it turns out to be nothing." They work hard and try to do a good job, says the reporter, "but they have trouble acknowledging their mistakes." And what about Chairman Hundt? "He has the demeanor of an adversarial courtroom lawyer, which is what he was. He looks and talks like a guy who went to high school with Al Gore." Hundt does, in fact, stand accused of being both imperial and impolitic at times in running the FCC - a top-down command-and-control managerial style rather than consensus-seeking.

 "Things are happening so quickly in the marketplace, regulatory-wise and technologically, that it's difficult to get a grip on it," says Jeff Baumann, executive vice president and general counsel of the NAB. "I don't think the public is aware and I don't think the Congress and the FCC have taken time to reflect on what these innovations really mean." It may be that the public doesn't care, Baumann says, but they don't really have enough information to know if they should care or not. "Maybe nobody has the ability to convey to the American people what this might mean in ten or fifteen years."

 Recently, though, the press was more than eager to report fully on a crucial matter before the FCC and ran up against what reporters called a "gag order" imposed by Chairman Hundt. "No party to the case could talk to the press and no documents were available," says one. "It seemed clearly an overstepping of his bounds." Rupert Murdoch's Australia-based News Corporation - parent of the Fox television network - was being investigated to see if it had misled the commission in 1985 when it purchased six Metromedia television stations. Under long-standing rules, foreigners are precluded from controlling TV stations in the U.S.

 A mini-storm of controversy over the gag order erupted. David Bartlett, president of the 4,000-member Radio-Television News Directors Association, threatened possible legal action. FCC commissioner Quello called Hundt's action a "star chamber" proceeding and said it had "undermined" the agency's credibility. He also asserted that the order shouldn't have been issued without consulting the other commissioners, and complained he'd been denied access to documents pertaining to the case.

Asked about the instance, Hundt responds with an edge of impatience: "Number one, it wasn't a gag order, and of course no reporter bothered to call me and ask me about it." What was it then? "It's called a confidentiality order. There are somewhere in the nature of hundreds of thousands issued by courts every year in this country and they're designed to protect the confidentiality of the disclosures made by the parties to assure the integrity of an investigation." You don't care for the term "gag order?" I inquired. "Not only don't I care for it," Hundt shot back, "it is utterly inaccurate. Reporters in Washington - and this is no big surprise - like to cover political controversy. Any allegation gets covered. The problem here is we are trying to cope with brand new issues that are incredibly important to the country and we would very much benefit from public discussion of them." But - observers pointed out - the "confidentiality order" quite effectively had inhibited such public discussion.

Subsequently, on April 21,1995, the Los Angeles Times reported that the FCC was indeed considering forcing News Corporation to reduce its stake in each of its U.S. stations from 99 percent to the legal 25 percent - a move that could cost the company hundreds of millions in capital gains taxes. In obvious agitation, Rupert Murdoch fired off a statement denying any misfeasance and claiming that the whole matter "has been directed and controlled by the FCC chairman - even to the point of excluding other commissioners." He accused Hundt of "acting as both prosecutor and judge and using clearly prejudicial procedures." And his parting shot: "Given Mr. Hundt's reputation, we have been reluctant to speak out. God knows he can hurt us and seems determined to do so." In early May, however, the commission backed off on the ground that the rules about foreign ownership had been unclear at the time Murdoch bought his American stations in 1985. Some FCC adepts ridiculed the agency's retreat as a failure to act forcefullyn a case where compliance with the law (in their view) clearly was being bent. Eleven days later the whole matter became moot when Fox Television Stations Inc. announced it had found a tax-free way to restructure, and was doing so in the effort to satisfy the commission's concerns.

A major area of concern for many FCC-watchers is protection of the public interest - long the bedrock of American broadcasting. "The commission isn't doing anything about that," worries the Rev. Everett C. Parker, former head of the Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ. "They're getting rid of regulations and letting these various media operate as they please," he insists. "There's no effort to enforce a responsibility to do anything in the public interest." Handing over additional spectrum to broadcasters is "criminal," he says, because impecunious minority and advocacy groups will be foreclosed from becoming players in broadcasting. Those channels will be gone for good, he claims, as when public land is sold. For his part, Hundt insists he is indeed committed to defending the public's stake in all this. Last year, he promised he'd "redefine, restate, and renew the social compact between the public and the broadcasting industry."

Parker is a long-time defender of the Fairness Doctrine, which-until it was abolished during the Reagan years - obliged station owners as a condition of license renewal to seek out and air opposing views on controversial matters of public importance. "Now we have all these talk radio shows spewing out hatred and no possibility of getting another viewpoint on," he says. When you ask a station manager for rebuttal time, Parker insists, the answer is: "Why should I? These shows grab big audiences and sell lots of products."

Chairman Hundt opposes reinstituting the Fairness Doctrine: "This isn't the time to be dwelling on the scarcity of voices," he says. "It's the time to be finding ways to maximize the number of outlets. An aggressive competition policy is the cure for all of the evils the Fairness Doctrine was designed to address."

After the April 19 Oklahoma City tragedy in which 168 were killed by anti-government terrorists, President Clinton attacked the evils of "loud and angry voices in America" that were fueling civil unrest via talk radio. His words prompted speculation that the FCC might crack down on right-wing talkathons. But the commission's response was that the First Amendment and the 1934 Communications Act forbade any such action. Even when the Watergate co-conspirator and radio host G. Gordon Liddy advised his listeners on shooting federal agents in legally justified self-defense, the FCC said its hands were tied "in the absence of evidence of clear and present danger of imminent violence." That also goes for public access cable (under the amended Cable Act of 1984), making the world of cable TV safe for programs like Race & Reason, an anti-black, anti-Jewish program decorated by a Nazi swastika and Confederate flag. The FCC is, however, looking into possible rules violations relating to a shortwave radio program (rebrocast on some commercial stations), The Intelligence Report, conducted by Mark Koernke, the Michigan militiaman whose anti-government rants came to public view in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. As reported by Broadcasting & Cable, the program may violate radio rules that require shortwave programs to be aimed at audiences outside the United States.

 The FCC actually does have its toe in the water of content regulation, insists the RTNDA's Bartlett, "in ways we think either violate the First Amendment or come awfully close." Newspapers and magazines, for example, can editorialize for or against political candidates all they like, but radio and TV stations are obliged by law to offer air time for reply. "Our members are united in one thing," Bartlett says, "and that's that government should butt out of the editorial business."

But most experts resist abolishing the FCC altogether. One of the most respected theorists in telecommunications is Henry Geller, fellow at the Markle Foundation, senior fellow at The Annenberg Washington Program, former general counsel to the FCC, and onetime assistant secretary of commerce, who believes the commission is moving too slowly "to unscrew the system" and is horrified by the commission's micromanaging of the cable industry but sees any effort to abolish the FCC as a "crazy idea." Especially now, as the historic transition from monopoly to full competition in the cable and telephone industries is under way. The NAB's Baumann concurs. Despite what anybody thinks of the commission and its efforts to make the trains run on time, Baumann insists, "there's always going to be a need for an organization like the FCC." Janice Obuchowski, president of Freedom Technologies and a former head of the White House's National Telecommunications and Information Administration says, "You can never overstate the ro of the FCC. It's where the rubber meets the road on all of these information highway and globalization issues."

"I predict 1995 will be the end of the first era of television and the beginning of the second," Reed Hundt has ventured. The mantra for the new era is "competition," intoned hundreds of times a day by devotees in the great ashram of the new information order. And competition does indeed hold out the promise of greater choice and lower costs for consumers. It may, however, be competition between more gigantic - and fewer - players than ever before, in a concentration of power that will "make Citizen Kane look like an underachiever," in Representative Edward Markey's words.

As long ago as 1929 the Federal Radio Commission (predecessor to the FCC) decided that broadcast stations were "licensed to serve the public and not for the purpose of furthering the private or selfish interests of individuals or groups of individuals. The standard of public interest, convenience, or necessity means nothing if it does not mean this." That statement seems merely quaint today as wired and wireless superfluity of conduits replaces scarcity and the public's birthright of spectrum is at risk of being sold off like a mess of pottage. What's good for Bell Atlantic and Viacom and ABC may or may not be good for the country - to recall GM president "Engine" Charlie Wilson's famous epigram from the 1950s. Right now decisions are being made and contemplated that will be irrevocable and will profoundly affect for generations the lives of individuals and corporations. Who will speak for the public to help assure that the palpable benefits of the New Cyberia will not be denied those less able to pay - the or, as well as libraries, schools, museums, and hospitals? Or have the people no standing in an increasingly privatized world except as they are allowed to vote with their pocketbooks - as consumers of an immense, new, seductive array of goods and services in the great electronic shopping mall under construction? And will the people be denied what they need to know about this by a press increasingly subsumed in the vested and conflicting self-interests of merged mega-corporations?

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