U.S. Won’t Appeal Media Ruling

The Bush administration said Thursday that it would not seek Supreme Court review of a lower-court ruling that has made it harder for the nation’s media giants to get even bigger.

The call by the U.S. solicitor general’s office is a blow for companies including News Corp., Viacom Inc., General Electric Co.’s NBC and Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times.

Those firms, along with the National Assn. of Broadcasters, are still expected to ask the high court to overturn the federal appeals court decision, which came last summer. But without the clout of the solicitor general behind them, analysts said, the companies face relatively long odds that the case will even be heard.

Opponents of media consolidation, who contend that the diversity of voices on the nation’s airwaves is being imperiled, hailed the administration’s action.

This “represents a great triumph for our democracy,” said Rep. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.).

The rules governing the concentration of media ownership were refashioned in 2003 by a sharply divided Federal Communications Commission.

Outgoing FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell helped lead the effort to allow companies to expand the number of television stations that they can own in the same market. What’s more, the revamped rules pushed by Powell let companies own both TV stations and newspapers in a single city.

Powell had argued that the proliferation of choices available over the Internet and on cable TV had rendered antiquated the rules limiting multiple ownership.

But the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia put up a roadblock in June, essentially barring the FCC from implementing these looser regulations. It ordered the agency to rewrite the broadcast ownership rules and asked for better justification of the newspaper-TV cross-ownership measure.

“Michael Powell had his deregulatory thumb on the scale,” said Andrew Schwartzman, head of the Media Access Project, a public interest group that has been part of a wide-ranging political coalition united on the issue.

Powell, who was attending a global economic forum in Davos, Switzerland, told Bloomberg News on Thursday that he was confident that the FCC’s position was “legally solid.” But, he added, “that’s not the sole reason to take a case to the Supreme Court.”

One FCC official, who asked not be identified, said the White House believed it would have had a weak case because no major constitutional issues were involved and because the appeals court made no glaring mistakes.

Shaun Sheehan, Tribune’s vice president of government affairs, said lawyers for the company would continue to argue that the lower-court ruling has deprived broadcasters of their right to free speech and due process.

“We’re disappointed the solicitor general is not appealing the case, but we think there are enough compelling issues in this case” for the Supreme Court to take it anyway, Sheehan said.

Meanwhile, Sheehan said he was hopeful that Tribune could win waivers in Los Angeles, Chicago and three other cities where it owns both a newspaper and television station. In L.A., Tribune owns The Times and KTLA-TV Channel 5, whose license renewal is scheduled for next year.

Spokesmen for News Corp. and Viacom declined to comment.

Analysts said media giants would probably be granted waivers, pending a fresh FCC review of its media ownership rules. That process, which is not expected to begin until the White House designates a replacement for the departing Powell this spring, could take a year or more.

FCC commissioners could still ease the ownership rules, but analysts said they would probably push incremental changes to prevent the kind of firestorm that Powell ignited.

“Directionally the rules will be similar, but tactically the process will be different,” predicted Blair Levin, a communications analyst for Legg Mason Equity Research in Washington. “Powell tried to do the Big Bang media deregulation.”

Indeed, Powell’s aggressive attempt to make wholesale changes to the restrictions, rather than chip away at them, galvanized a politically diverse group of critics. Among those at odds with the FCC were the National Rifle Assn. and the National Organization for Women.

The two Democrats on the five-member FCC, both of whom opposed Powell on media ownership, called on the agency to schedule public hearings and begin a new review.

“If we do credible studies and do our homework, we can come up with better rules,” said one of the Democrats, Commissioner Michael J. Copps.