Released: November 05, 2007

Copps of FCC crusades against consolidation

Source: Jim Puzzanghera, Los Angeles Times (Free Registration)

ASHINGTON — His dark suits. His wing-tipped shoes. The nearly four decades he’s toiled in the nation’s capital, including the last six years on the Federal Communications Commission.

Everything about Michael J. Copps screams bureaucrat - until he opens his mouth.

Copps, a Democrat whose crusade against media consolidation has helped make him Hollywood’s public-policy enemy No. 1, is more proselytizer than pencil pusher.

The public airwaves, he says, are filled with “too much baloney passed off as news.” The Republican-led FCC is so lax that “unless you’re a child abuser or a wife beater, it’s a slam-dunk” to renew a TV station license. “Our country is paying a dreadful cost for this quarter-century fling with government abdication and media irresponsibility,” he said this year.

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