Charles D. Ferris, a champion of deregulation at the FCC

Charles D. Ferris, a Washington lawyer who helped enact landmark civil rights legislation as a top aide to Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) and who helped usher in an era of telecommunications deregulation as head of the Federal Communications Commission, died Feb. 16 at his home in Chevy Chase (MD). He was 90. As chairman of the FCC from 1977 to 1981, Ferris loosened restrictions on the radio, telephone, cable, and satellite television industries, arguing that the public interest was often better served by a competitive marketplace rather than government regulators trying to play the role of referee. His tenure “transformed how the FCC does business,” according to broadcast and media scholar Reed W. Smith, with deregulation only escalating during the Reagan administration. Ferris “changed the FCC’s status from being a behind-the-times and sluggish agency to being one that was activist and innovative,” Smith wrote in a 2014 article for the Journal of Radio & Audio Media. Nominated by President Jimmy Carter and unanimously confirmed by the Senate in October 1977, Ferris had hardly any technical knowledge of broadcasting and communications, though he dryly noted that he had been “using a telephone and listening to the radio” since boyhood and had “been watching television” for nearly as long. What he lacked in policy expertise he made up for in political experience, having spent nearly 14 years on Capitol Hill as an adroit and decisive chief counsel to Sen Mansfield and, briefly, Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. Ferris sided with fellow Carter administration officials such as Alfred E. Kahn, the head of the Civil Aeronautics Board, in championing a looser approach to government oversight. He hired a bevy of economists to an agency that had long been staffed primarily by lawyers, and argued that unless regulations were “improving the market,” they “were nothing but a nuisance.” Under his direction, the agency removed rate regulations on telephone equipment and paved the way for consolidation between the telephone and computer industries, notably by allowing AT&T to enter the computer field through a subsidiary. The agency was also credited with helping encourage a cable television boom by eliminating key restrictions on programming and satellite use; eliminating paperwork requirements for local radio broadcasters; simplifying the licensing procedure for new radio stations; and helping women and minorities qualify for broadcast station ownership.