Powell Takes a Pounding
Attacks on the FCC chair have been unrelenting. But Michael Powell might just know what he's doing.
from the Jul. 26, 2004 issue
By Daniel Roth
If you think Colin Powell's had it bad this summer—forget Fahrenheit 9/11, we're still trying to wipe away the image of him "YMCA"ercising in Indonesia—just imagine what his son is going through. In a mere six days in late June, Michael Powell, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, saw his carefully crafted plan for relaxing media ownership restrictions slapped down by a federal appeals court (the decision noted that a central section of his case "requires us to abandon both logic and reality"); had a U.S. Senator accuse his commission of potentially violating federal law in a spectrum swap proposal; and, in what has to be a first for an FCC chief, served as the target of a Howard Stern diatribe. "Michael Powell [is] a guy you didn't vote for, a guy who got his job because his father works for the Bush administration," declared the shock jock to his millions of listeners. "He's a crackpot, and I have said he's a crackpot." Also, pointed out Stern, he's "a boob and a jerk."
