Today we vote. Tomorrow we abolish the FCC.

UPDATE: Ex-FCC commish Nick Johnson weighs in on my piece in Letters.

I mentioned on some radio show or another yesterday — I did four, including a sound bite for "Marketplace" — that in my 11 years on the television beat, I have gone from someone who thought government had some role in monitoring television content to someone opposed to almost all regulation of the media.

These feelings actually began to bubble up during the Clinton Administration (kind of funny to think we may have to start calling it the "Bill Clinton Administration" someday, and speaking of which, do not miss "My Buddy Bill" on Comedy Central this week). I remembering interviewing Brian Lamb of C-SPAN, something I wish I could do every six months or so just because I always feel better about TV when I think about C-SPAN. And Lamb was telling me about some of the havoc that gov't regulations had wreaked on C-SPAN, a network with absolutely no leverage over where it appears, who picks it up, who drops it, who uses it to punish deadbeat cable customers (I've heard of operators who drop every station but C-SPAN to force people to pay their bills), etc.

If I were president, Brian Lamb would get one of these every week. Until, of course, that got old. (credit)

In general, cable ops love C-SPAN. It makes them look good, and it's a bargain —” $50 million a year buys them 7,000 hours, or 10,000 hours, I've lost count, of original programming. But when a government rule makes it impossible to carry one of the three C-SPANs, boom, they drop it. Bandwidth is scarce, and if an operator is told he must make room for one more channel, and the corporate financials are based on there being only 202 channels available for video programming (the rest are set aside for making real money), well, the first thing to go is always the spare C-SPAN channel.

For years the circulation of C-SPAN2 lagged far behind C-SPAN because cable was analog back then and in the early 1990s Congress passed a bill that contained something called "the must-carry rule." The name speaks for itself. Cable ops were told they had to offer some channels they wouldn't necessarily offer if they weren't forced to, and in those days you couldn't just crank up the digital compressor and shoehorn in one more program, so C-SPAN Deux got the boot.

Lamb, who so highly prizes his neutrality that he once took himself off the air for getting mildly upset at a caller, has always ardently opposed must-carry. And since that first conversation we had about it, I've been on the road to media libertarianism ever since.

Lately, Congress has been less the problem than the Federal Communications Commission, the five-member panel that is easily the most reviled government agency not operating in Gitmo. Most of what the FCC does is not widely covered in the press, but that which is by itself seems worthy of the agency's abolition. Every year around Super Bowl time we are reminded of how the FCC ruined the halftime show, but the more serious matter is how the FCC paternalistically took away the networks' power to regulate themselves by imposing arbitrary and idiotic fines for things they said you couldn't say or do on broadcast TV. Is TV really better off because then-FCC chairman Michael Powell rewound his TiVo 50 times to look at Janet Jackson's breast? Seriously.

Cable TV shows are often ten times worse than anything the networks would allow, even before the Scare, but the FCC doesn't fine cable companies because the courts have ruled they can't. FCC's nerdy and internally disliked chairman, Kevin Martin, would like to be able to fine the cable channels, and so would these fellow Americans whose complaints reveal just what kind of person takes the trouble to contact the federal government about indecency on TV.

It is beyond quaint that broadcasters are still held to a different standard than cable even though, on a typical night, at least one or two cable networks are getting higher ratings than one or two broadcast networks. Martin would like to level the playing field. I'd rather scorch it and put Martin out of the field-leveling business. But that's just me.

Anyway, back to the current FCC mess. Like Dean Wormer in "Animal House," the feds have come up with something called "double must-carry." You can read about it here:

Link: C-SPAN, Discovery, Others Sue FCC Over 'Dual-Carriage' - 2/4/2008 11:14:00 AM - Broadcasting & Cable.

Basically the idea is that because the mandated digital conversion that's happening in one year — yep, more government-driven goodness — has been a big fat failure, millions of Americans will not have digital cable boxes next February, when analog TV signals are switched off. As you know if you have a digital cable box, any digital signals a TV station puts out are carried only on the cable op's digital tier, like channel 1442 or something. So when its analog equivalent, say channel 13, goes away, the only way you can see NBC is to get a digital cable box.

This is not acceptable to the FCC, which is ordering cable operators to carry the new digital signals on both analog AND digital cable. And even in this age of expanded bandwidth, that will almost certainly force operators to make hard choices about what to keep on digital cable.

Of course, if the FCC had no power over the cable industry (as I am proposing), the public's outrage at suddenly not getting NBC in their homes would be entirely directed at the companies who are making money off said customers. Now, I'm no Milton Friedman groupie, but wouldn't you think the free market would come up with a solution to that in a jiffy, or half a jiffy?

The word "change" has been used to describe a lot of poorly defined things in this election campaign. I'm for actual change. I'm for abolishing the FCC. Yes sir, Senator (and once Mitt Romney drops out there will be only senators left). Now there's change we can believe in.