Victories in D.C. Are Too Rare for Rehr

David Rehr finally caught a break in Washington this week. A federal grand jury there indicted Republican Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska on public corruption charges.

Stevens, a key player on communications issues, seems to have had it in for the NAB president ever since he assumed the top job at NAB in 2005. Rehr, you see, had the temerity to accept the job that Stevens thought should go to his protégé, Mitch Rose.

So, the indictment should give Rehr hope that the prosecutors or Alaskan voters (Stevens stands for re-election this fall) will soon remove one very large, cantankerous thorn from his side.

And Rehr needs some good news, even that ugly kind that comes in the form of bad news for someone else.

Rehr's NAB has been having a hard time getting its way in Washington, especially at the FCC where most of the action has been. And it's been forced to play defense by an FCC suddenly and inexplicably bent on making life for broadcasters as unpleasant as possible.

The NAB's difficulties culminated (and became apparent to all) late last week when the FCC approved the merger of the two satellite radio players, XM and Sirius, despite NAB's all-out, multimillion-dollar campaign to block it.

Radio broadcasters are deathly afraid of satellite radio and the combination of XM and Sirius multiples the threat many times. Sirius XM will be a better service and is more likely to survive its current financial woes than the two companies on their own.

Rehr went toe to toe with Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin and lost -- first at the Justice Department and then at the FCC. There is no other way you can spin it.

That is not to say that Rehr didn't draw blood. The NAB's efforts delayed the merger for at least a year and forced the financially strapped satellite companies to spend tens of millions of dollars to grease the way in Washington.

The intensity of the battle may explain why Karmazin felt it necessary to go on the Howard Stern show this week to gloat and to mock Rehr and the NAB strategy.

That the NAB lobbied so hard to block the deal proved that the markets of satellite and terrestrial radio were one and the same and that the satellite merger would not result in any kind of monopoly, Karmazin told Stern's listeners (as if they cared), according to a report in Inside Radio.

The flawed strategy was on display when Rehr hung a banner on its building saying "Stop the Merger," Karmazin said.

"Thank goodness for it and hats off to the head of the NAB. We all owe him," he said. "When we all get to toast this merger, I will be celebrating him first."

The XM-Sirius merger is a big deal, but it would not be such a big deal if Rehr and company were racking up big wins elsewhere. They aren't.

The Rehr NAB got off to a poor start at the FCC in June 2006 when it failed to win multicast must-carry rights for broadcasters when they had the chance. It slipped away when Commissioner Robert McDowell decided to cast his lot with cable.

But things really started going bad for TV broadcasters and the NAB last year when FCC Chairman Kevin Martin shook off his conservative Republican principles and began behaving as if he had spent his undergrad days at Berkeley rather than UNC.

With Martin in the lead, the FCC mandated DTV transition awareness PSAs, imposed a rigorous quarterly programming disclosure regime and launched a rulemaking that may result in programming quotas and stiff ascertainment requirements.

The FCC also began looking into broadcasters' use of video news releases and product placement advertising.

And what is most alarming are reports that Martin may try to help out small cable operators by weakening broadcasters' retransmission consent rights -- just as station groups are beginning to count on retrans as a badly needed new source of revenue.

It's almost as if Martin is out to punish TV stations.

I'm not sure how you deal with an FCC chairman that has run amok, but that's Rehr's job and so far he hasn't had much success doing it. The anti-broadcasting proposals keep piling up.

Rehr can't look to Capitol Hill for much help. It's been his bad luck that the Democrats took over Congress in 2006. They are more apt to cheer Martin on in his regulatory efforts than to rein him in.

And he can't simply hang on and wait for a change in administrations. Martin will be gone by next January, but in his place will be an appointee of either Barack Obama or John McCain. Obama is a regulator and McCain is no friend of broadcasting.

No one doubts Rehr's energy and commitment. Whatever the odds, he will be working hard to derail or deflate Martin's agenda.