Meet the New FCC Boss (Worse than the Old Boss)

Over at the indispensable Nobody's Business, Rogier van Bakel gives a quick gloss on Kevin Martin, the Bush admin's choice to replace outgoing Federal Communciation Commission honcho Michael Powell:

The White House has asked FCC commissioner Kevin Martin to take the reins from resigning chairman Michael Powell. In terms of the government cracking down on perceived indecency by broadcasters, that'll mean more of the same, just worse.

Bakel notes that Martin wasn't satisfied with fining CBS for Nipplegate; he wanted an investigation of the whole Janet Jackson Super Bowl halftime show.

He concludes:

I caught flak from a couple of readers two days ago when I called U.S. highschool students airheads for believing the government should censor the media. "For crying out loud, these are thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds," wrote one. "Give 'em some time and cut 'em some slack. They'll eventually acquire a modicum of common sense and a bit of historical perspective."

Maybe. Or they might grow up to be the next Kevin Martin, who, at the ripe old age of 38, still doesn't appear to have studied the Bill of Rights all that closely.

Whole thing here.

Reason's Q&A with Powell from our December 2004 ish here.

What the want of a bra reduced us to here.

And the all-time champeen in bizarre overreactions to Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, in which National Review columnist Michael Novak declares "a more radically anti-Jewish and anti-Christian assault, embodying the sort of Wagnerian images of pagan disgust and decay that enraptured Hitlerian audiences, would be hard for [the NFL] to produce" and that the league should stage a decade's worth half-time extravaganzas celebrating the founding of the U.S., is here.