Why else would Powell and his pubbie brothers on the FCC board fly in the face of all the dissent on the decision? More than 90% of public comment was against lessening the rules. Congress wasn’t thrilled either.
Powell is an evil dweeb. He said that limiting ownership of media outlets by one corporation was violating the first amendment rights of those corporations because it was limiting the number of subsidiaries they could talk to. Wow, what Orwellian logic.
The media rolled over and played dead during Grenada and Panama when there was no pending regulatory change. They rolled over, again, in Gulf I when there was no pending regulatory change. I fail to see where their actions were any different in Gulf II than in the three previous invasions. Given that they behaved in exactly the same manner for four consecutive invasions, how would one expect them to have reported this differently if they had not wanted to influence the regulatory process?
(The media was hardly condemning of Clinton’s actions, for that matter, but the actions undertaken by the Clinton administration tended to not be the sort of full-scale invasion that I have used to show the parallels.)
This looks much more like coincidence than back room dealings, to me.