Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael K. Powell plans to resign from the agency - the job he's held for four years, two agency officials said today.
Powell, apparently does not plan to step down immediately, the officials said. However, he will leave soon. While he might've done a whole lot of stuff during his tenure at the FCC, Powell is probably best known for overseeing a dramatic crackdown on broadcast "indecency".
Is this good news for terrestrial radio? Doubt it.
Since the damn Jackson's Super Bowl halftime incident last February, the FCC received over 1 million indecency complaints in 2004 (more than 540,000 were specifically for Ms. Jackson's shindig). But interestingly enough, nearly 99.9 percent of indecency complaints - aside from those concerning the ?wardrobe malfunction? ? were brought by the Parents Television Council (an activist group), according to the FCC analysis dated October 1, 2004. Nearly all indecency complaints ? a whopping 99.8 percent ? were filed by the Parents Television Council, in 2003.
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So will Mr. Powell resigning get the the PTC to stop sending complaints to the FCC? Probably not. But at least the spokesperson behind the ?a dramatic rise in public concern and outrage about what is being broadcast into their homes,? as Mr. Powell said will be gone.
Good riddance.
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