Two Democratic members of the FCC held an unofficial hearing in Seattle yesterday on federal media ownership rules. As Eric Pryne reports in this morning's paper:

While the agency has proposed no changes yet, many of the 400 people at Thursday night's forum at the Seattle Public Library feared the commission's Republican majority eventually will adopt something similar to revisions it approved in 2003.

A federal appeals-court panel later blocked those changes. Among other things, they would have relaxed limits on how many TV stations a company can own in one market, and repealed a 1975 rule that prohibits a company from owning broadcast outlets and a daily newspaper in the same city.

Pryne also had a backround piece in Thursday's paper.

The Times co-sponsored the event with Reclaim the Media , KBCS 91.3fm Community Radio, the Minority Executive Directors Coalition and the UW Department of Communication.

The involvement of the Times and the testimony of Times Publisher Frank Blethen bugged some of the liberals who attended the hearing and wrote about it today. David Goldstein reluctantly says he and Blethen agree on media consolidation. It's not a comfortable place for Goldstein or others to be, given that the publisher they love to bash is on their side this time and the owners of the P-I, as well as the owners of TV stations KING, KIRO and KCPQ, are pushing the FCC to relax limits on how many TV stations a company can own.

The most interesting take on the hearing comes from Geov Parrish, writing at horsesass.org. He watched the hearings and saw it as a "microcosm of a larger problem. Progressives have been out of power so routinely that when we do have power, far too often we have no idea how to use it."

Despite the turnout, and the overwhelming opposition to media deregulation by the crowd, progressives reading themselves into the public record did themselves few favors last night. The two most compelling speakers on the night, IMO, were John Carlson (KVI talk show host and the night's sole self-identified Republican), who made the conservative case for regulating media ownership, and UW President Mark Emmert, who made an educator's pitch for media diversity as necessary for fostering critical thinking skills in a democracy. In a sea of progressives, the standout critics were a conservative talk show host and (essentially) the CEO of one of the region's biggest employers.

Granted, Carlson and Emmert are both polished public speakers, and both are familiar with how to couch arguments that make sense to lawmakers and regulators. But that's just the point: with few exceptions, the several dozen mostly left-leaning public speakers that followed in testimony weren't. Many were lost in a sea of abstract theory; a number made the repetitive case that concentrated media ownership is bad — completely true, but also tangential and in important ways irrelevant to the proceeding, since that question was settled (for the FCC's purposes) by Congress with the abysmal Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Blogger Fernsehturm wrote from the hearing, and about trying to decide what he wanted to tell the FCC:

I think I'm going to talk about media ownership. In particular, I'm going to mention the fact that there is only one full-time broadcast journalist from the Seattle media market in Olympia. That journalist being KUOW's Austin Jenkins. That seems a bit wrong. Maybe I'm just a simple public affairs student who thinks that what happens at the state government level is worth more than just one full-time reporter. Where's my local government coverage? I love Austin but he can't do it himself.

Andrew at the Northwest Progressive Institute live-blogged the hearing. You can read all this posts here. He was more impressed with the progressives' showing than Parrish was.

It was a packed hearing and I don't remember hearing a citizen who did not speak out against media consolidation and concentration. It is clear that what corporate executives want is not what the public wants.

In his review, Andrew also says:

Commissioner Adelstein was just as fabulous. Among one of his best lines: "Today, if Elvis Presley was playing, he'd probably throw down his guitar in disgust because he couldn't get on the radio." He also noted that "local newscasts are dominated by sensationalism....if it bleeds, it leads."