MIKE PESCA: The media issues discussed by Bush and Kerry so far in the campaign have been limited to who reads more newspapers and whose ads are meaner. But recently, John Kerry said he'd like to shake things up at the FCC. Here's what he told the UNITY Convention of Minority Journalists in Washington, DC last month. [TAPE PLAYS]

JOHN KERRY: I'm against the ongoing push for media consolidation. I was in favor of the rollback. I voted against the expansion, and as president, as I said, I will appoint people to the FCC, and I will pursue a policy that tries to have as diverse and broad an ownership as possible.

MIKE PESCA: Mark Fitzgerald has written about Kerry's media policy for Editor & Publisher Magazine. Fitzgerald says the kinds of changes Kerry mentioned are quite doable.

MARK FITZGERALD: All he is really talking about is turning back the clock, literally, a few months, and there is legislation both before Congress and of course there was recently a federal court decision that told the FCC to go back and look at how they re-wrote the rules again.

MIKE PESCA: So for all the things a president can't do, if the other party controls the House and the Senate, some of these FCC regulations are something that Kerry can do. Why? Does he immediately appoint new commissioners? How does the FCC board work?

MARK FITZGERALD: The FCC has five members. The party in power has appointment of three, and the chairman, who is Michael Powell, right now, a Republican, would, if following tradition, resign as soon as Kerry took office, and Kerry would be able to appoint a chairman and another Democrat, so you would have three Democrats.

MIKE PESCA: Do you have any idea about who or even what type of commissioners Kerry would be looking for as an FCC appointee?

MARK FITZGERALD: Well, the told the people at UNITY that what he wanted was somebody that would be way more activist than we've seen on content in broadcasting. There's been a lot of attention, of course, to the Howard Stern situation here in Chicago, Mankow Muller, but in actual fact, the FCC has really not been too concerned with indecency, and this is something that both of the Democrats on the FCC have really tried to change. That's one reason that they've been so successful in forming this coalition of people from right to life and the NRA and social conservatives, right up to Michael Moore sorts of people, MoveOn.org, some of the media organizations that we're beginning to see.

MIKE PESCA: How would the change in the FCC board, assuming that it became 3-2 Democrat instead of 3-2 Republican -- how might that result in a change that we'd actually see in our media?

MARK FITZGERALD: You'd see it, I think, almost right away. A good example is: John Kerry has declared that he would like cable companies to be forced to price their options by each channel. You typically get big packages, and these packages are made in various ways. You'd be able to say, well I don't want the golf channel, and I'm not going to pay for it. I don't want A&E, and I'm not going to pay for it.

MIKE PESCA: Now when the FCC tried a little deregulation last year, a surprisingly bipartisan coalition rose up against it, and also surprising was the fact that the public woke up and noticed what was going on. I think that did surprise President Bush a little. So, if there was this groundswell of opposition to media deregulation, and if Kerry stands on the other side of the issue, why don't you think this has become a big election issue -- that Kerry has a stance that the people seem to like more than Bush's stance on the issue of media deregulation?

MARK FITZGERALD: That's a very interesting question. At UNITY, John Kerry answered this only in answer to a question -- he didn't bring this up as part of his speech. But I would say this: John Edwards actually spoke about this quite a bit during his own campaign. He has been more forward on this issue than John Kerry was.

MIKE PESCA: And do you think that part of the reason why he raised it, as you said, in response to a direct question, but hasn't made it a big campaign issue has to do with the fact that he does have to do some massaging with the actual media companies who will probably oppose what he's talking about -- maybe it has something to do with the fact that he's hoping for some good coverage from now until election day?

MARK FITZGERALD: Yeah, I think that what [LAUGHS] - as we've seen what happens with the media is that they don't necessarily punish somebody like this for bringing these things up. They simply don't bring it up themselves. The media has done a terrible, terrible job in telling the American people what was at issue here in 2003. In February of 2003, about four months before the actual decisions were to be made, a Pew poll found that 73 percent of Americans had no idea that there was going to be changes in who could own their local TV stations, who -- whether their local newspaper could own their local radio station, and that is absolutely the fault of the media, cause it just simply wasn't covered.

MIKE PESCA: All right. Well, thanks very much, Mark Fitzgerald, editor at large for Editor & Publisher. Thank you.

MARK FITZGERALD: My pleasure.