Genachowski: New Media Man with Old Media Roots

Julius Genachowski, President Obama's nominee to be the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, is generally viewed as a high-tech maven based on his years as a top executive at Barry Diller's Web-heavy IAC/InterActive Corp. and several subsequent years heading his own investment firm for digital media. But a closer look reveals a career steeped in old-fashioned television.

Prior to embracing the new media, Genachowski spent several years deeply involved in the law, policy and management of broadcasting and cable. The old media has even played a bigger than usual part in his life as a husband and father.

What Genachowski knows about TV may have begun in 1994 when he was working as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice David Souter and the court was considering the constitutionality of the FCC's must-carry rules. Justice Souter was part of the 5-4 majority that remanded the case to a lower court and again in 1997 when the high court affirmed the rules.

Soon after the 1994 vote, then-FCC Chairman Reed Hundt brought Genachowski into the FCC and set him to work as a special counsel to then-General Counsel Bill Kennard and later as his own chief legal aide. At the FCC, Genachowski worked on some of the most important and contentious broadcast TV proceedings of the time, including the repeal of the financial interest/syndication and the primetime access rules, the expansion of children's television obligations and the crafting of the digital television rules.

While working at IAC/InterActive, Genachowski's boss, Barry Diller, was appointed to the so-called Gore Commission, which was to determine the public interest obligations of TV stations in a digital era. As Diller's surrogate, Genachowski helped write the "public interest programming and community service certification form" ultimately recommended to the commission, according to Gigi Sohn, president of the advocacy group, Public Knowledge. That form is similar to the new FCC Form 355 approved by the FCC last year as part of its enhanced TV disclosure requirements, Sohn says.