Wired

WIRED
[SOURCE: Capital Eye, AUTHOR: Lindsay Renick Mayer]
According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, more than 100 former FCC employees have also worked in the private sector. At least 50 percent of them have lobbied on issues related to telecom, communications and broadcast at some point in their careers. Although the FCC is considered a “mid-size” government agency with nearly 1,850 employees (compared to the Department of Defense’s 675,000 employees), the Center’s new Revolving Door Database lists the FCC as the agency with the third-highest number of employees who have shuffled between the public and private interests focused on the federal government. Only the White House and the House of Representatives have more “revolving door” employees in the 6,400-person database, suggesting a high demand from law and lobbying firms for media and telecom expertise, said Mark Obbie, a journalism professor at Syracuse University who specializes in media law. “This is a hot practice area because policy is very much in flux. So the firms can dangle increasingly attractive offers in front of agency lawyers, because their clients are spending lots of money right now on this expertise,” Obbie said. Today, there should be greater separation between the private and public sectors , Stamm said. “You’d have a much better FCC if there was a revolving door between civically minded think tanks and the FCC, as opposed to private-sector, pro-corporate lobbyists and the FCC,” he said. “This is the stuff of the American culture and democracy. Look at the industry [the FCC] is regulating. Not steel. Not widgets. It’s regulating culture and the flow of information.”
http://capitaleye.org/inside.asp?ID=242

See also --
* Uncommon Candor
[SOURCE: MediaGeek ]
[Commentary] I have to reflect that the temptation to sell out as a FCC commissioner must be strong. Former chair Michael Powell had a soft landing with a lucrative and cushy position with a private equity fund specializing in media properties after he left the FCC in 2005. Sucking up to the desires of the industries you regulate certainly has its privileges. Without Copps’ and Adelstein’s dogged opposition to the Republican give-away campaign at the Commission we’d all be much worse off. Most tangibly, without them the AT&T-BellSouth merger would have been rubber-stamped without a single condition in support of the public interest, let alone network neutrality.
http://www.mediageek.net/?p=1493

* The Two Digital Divides
http://www.uspirg.org/html/consumer/archives/2007/01/ncmr2007_the_di.html