Tom Shales, TV critic at the Washington Post, has had it in for FCC Chairman Michael Powell for some time now. In the past, he has frequently taken potshots at Powell in the course of his coverage of one TV event of another. Finally, in the Sunday 11/21/04 issue of the paper, he went for broke with a full-length article called "Michael Powell Exposed: The FCC Chairman Has No Clothes." Within a couple of days, Renee Graham of the Boston Globe had joined in on the fun.

Decrying an attack on the First Amendment and the Janet Jackson incident, Shales wrote "At no point did anyone, including Chairman Powell, positioned now like Attila at the head of the Huns, produce one single living creature - - man, woman, child, toddler, infant, newborn, late-term fetus, dog, cat, rooster, horse or parakeet - - who saw the briefly exposed nipple and was in any tangible way harmed by it. Like most of the halftime entertainment, it was tastelessly inappropriate, but the ensuing mass fuss is a farce that has made America an international laughingstock again."

Shales also trained his poison pen on Democratic Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, decrying their insistence on license revocations.

Graham thinks Powell should be up for Time magazine's 2004 Person of the Year award. She notes that it is given for negative achievement as well as positive, and says "...no individual this year has had a greater effect on our cultural lives - - for good or ill, for better or worse - - than Powell."

Graham notes that some ABC stations replaced the pre-empted "Saving Private Ryan" with "Return to Mayberry." She opines, "Somehow, the selection of that film hardly seems a coincidence. It could certainly serve as a sad commentary on the archaic mind-set the FCC's restrictive rules is promoting, with Powell as an overbearing Barney Fife with too much power and too little desire to use it beyond fostering his own myopic cultural and political agenda."

RBR observation:
We have all kinds of problems with the current war on indecency. Still, it's a little hard for us to lay all of this on Michael Powell alone. We've seen the lynching party on Capitol Hill up close and personal, and almost everyone there is equally eager to 1) throw a noose around the broadcasting industry's collective neck and 2) grill Powell on why he isn't doing anything about it. Powell almost has no choice but to go after alleged indecent broadcasts ferociously. Given that, why shouldn't he go ahead to the front of the parade?