Washington—When Sen. Barack Obama speaks at a private fundraiser, his campaign workers bar reporters who show up on the spot. Only a handful of campaign reporters, pre-assigned for the occasion, are allowed into the function. No exceptions.

“That's the policy,” said Courtney Chapin, the Obama campaign aide assigned to give drive-by reporters the human Heisman trophy.

The ban was rigidly enforced Tuesday night at a Washington D.C. hotel where Democratic presidential hopeful Obama spoke briefly at a rally organized by many former Clinton administration officials and Harvard Law School classmate Julius Genachowski.

The event—attended by 550 people at $2,300 a pop—represented a wide cross-section of Democratic Party all-stars, power brokers and various insiders from the D.C. telecommunications policy w...Read More

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Fifty-five years of peace on the Korean peninsula suffered a minor setback last week after Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin landed in Seoul for a two-day ministerial session of the 30-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

According to a published report, Martin held a press conference that U.S. Embassy officials limited to U.S. media outlets, angering an excluded journalist with the Korean Times.

Reporter Cho Jin-seo described Martin's press conference as “a back-door meeting” planned by the FCC, and “officials from the U.S. Embassy in Seoul blocked access to reporters from other countries.”

Cho anonymously quoted an OECD official on the press management ways of U.S. government officials in other parts of the world.

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Washington—If Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin is smarting from his latest setback in federal court, he didn't show it a press conference Friday morning.

A day earlier, a panel of U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit stayed Martin-backed rules intended to slash the rates that third-party programmers pay to get on cable systems. It was the fourth judicial stay of an FCC order under Martin within the last few months.

When asked about the cable leased access stay, Martin launched into a discussion of the FCC's victory the week before in which its denial of a set-top box waiver for Comcast was upheld by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals ...Read More

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David Rehr, president of the National Association of Broadcasters, must be unlucky.

After a string of NAB policy defeats in Washington, D.C., the airline industry goes and produces one of its worst flight backups in decades just as thousands prepare to jet to NAB’s annual convention in Las Vegas.

Maybe it's because broadcasters and the airlines have something in common: Both use their political clout to gain access to the public airways and airwaves for free.

For Rehr, the first few months of 2008 have been a rotten time.

Among the setbacks:

-- Rehr demanded that the FCC require DirecTV to provide local TV service in every market by the end of 2008 as a condition on the transfer of News Corp.’s 40% s...Read More

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Evidently, NFL Commission Roger Goodell has something in common with Comcast and Time Warner Cable: He can’t get DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket, either.

“I come from New York. I can’t get satellite in New York City,” Goodell told the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet last Wednesday.

DirecTV, the No. satellite provider with 16.8 million subscribers, has exclusive pay-TV rights to the NFL’s out-of-market package, shutting out commercially jealous Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

Meanwhile, the NFL is considering filing a complaint at the FCC to force Comcast and Time Warner Cable to distribute the NFL Network, the league-owned cable channel which airs live just 8 of 256 regular season games.

Goodell’s no-satellite-TV-...Read More

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 Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin is expected to leave office when President Bush's second term expires next January. Preparing for the transition, Martin has put his Georgetown home on the market for $1.2 million, up more than $400,000 from when he bought it seven years ago, according to Mr. Emit Renraw, senior account executive at ETR Acala Properties of D.C.
Multichannel News Washington News editor Ted Hearn spoke by phone with Renraw last week about the state of D.C.’s luxury real estate market and the level of interest in the Martin property since it went on the market last year. Following is a partial transcript from the call (which should not be taken literally):

MCN: Tell me about the Martin home?

Renraw: First, ...Read More

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Washington – Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin dragged his agency all the way to Harvard Law School on Monday to make the same point he’s made in just about every U.S. time zone: He dislikes and distrusts Comcast Corp.

The Harvard session was billed as a discussion related to broadband network management practices. Instead, Martin decided to turn it into a federally sanctioned sandbagging of the country’s largest cable company. Martin let Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) take the first shots and then arrayed six Comcast-hostile witnesses against almost lonesome Comcast executive vice president David Cohen.

“It’s a pleasure to be here today as a participant and hopefully not the main course for your meal,” said Cohen, who received only tepid backing from University of Pennsylvania law professor Christopher Yoo.

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WASHINGTON -- The leading cable and broadcasting trade associations in Washington D.C. have made key personnel decisions -- but they both decided not to tell anyone.

Let's start with the National Cable & Telecommunications Association. Kyle McSlarrow, who became NCTA president in March 2005, would have been up for a contract extension this year if his original package had been for three years in keeping with past deals given NCTA's top person.

Asked about McSlarrow's contract status, an NCTA spokesman said McSlarrow received a four-year extension in late 2006, just 18 months after taking the job from his No. 2 post in the Department of Energy. McSlarrow, in other words, will be the face of the cable industry in Washington, D.C. until the end of 2010.

David Rehr, former president of the National Beer Wholesalers Association President, became president...Read More

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The story has been written three times: First by the Associated Press in March 2005, then by U.S. News & World Report in May, and then by The Washington Post on New Year’s Eve. And each story was highly inaccurate.
 
The claim in each story was this: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) performed political “favors" for Cablevision Systems chairman Charles F. Dolan because Dolan gave $200,000 to a McCain-backed political foundation called the Reform Institute.
 
And the Cablevision money flowed McCain’s way, so the stories go, entirely because Dolan and McCa...Read More

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Washington – Only someone like D.C. super lobbyist Eddie Fritts gets to take a few cost-free shots at Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin, who, as the cable industry knows all too well, isn’t afraid of playing by north Jersey mob rules when shown up in public.

Fritts -- former boss of the National Association of Broadcasters now running his own firm -- gave it his best shot Wednesday night at a roast in Martin’s honor attended by 1,500 lawyers, lobbyists, and others who routinely seek favors from the national media regulator. The evening is officially known as the annual FCC Chairman’s Dinner, o...Read More

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Congress on Thursday overrode President Bush’s veto for the first time, dealing the White House a setback on a multi-billion dollar water resources bill. 

The last time Congress rejected a Bush veto was Oct. 5, 1992, when President George H.W. Bush failed to stop passage of the massively re-regulatory Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act, which included must carry and retransmission consent handouts to local TV stations.

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