BOB GARFIELD: With the deadline approaching for the final vote on media ownership, Washington is churning with heated hearings, unlikely coalitions and whispers of vote trading. We asked Cable World's Alicia Mundy to give us the view from the capital.

ALICIA MUNDY: Everybody is now entrenching, and this is becoming a battle for the hearts and minds and other parts of the anatomies of the media, the public, members of Congress, Wall Street analysts and it's already gotten pretty vicious and bitter. The proposals were leaked out I think before they were actually printed out of the computers.

BOB GARFIELD: Alicia, when we last spoke about this, there seemed to be a 2 to 2 deadlock on the commission with the swing vote Commissioner Kevin Martin, a Republican, poised possibly to surprise everybody to vote against Chairman Powell, but that seems to have changed. What's happened since we discussed this with you last?

ALICIA MUNDY: He and Chairman Powell have come to an agreement -- that's to say they cut a deal. Kevin Martin has decided that he will go ahead with a vote that will raise the national network ownership caps which means that let's say CBS or ABC can buy more of their affiliated stations and reach more of the audience across the country than they can now, and in return for that, Michael Powell agreed that he would eliminate much of the ban against newspaper and broadcast station cross ownership by agreeing that they would go down to the medium size markets. So it won't just be the 10 largest markets in the country where you can own both a newspaper and a broadcast station; it's probably going to go down to about the 50th market.

BOB GARFIELD: So, not to put too fine a point on it, it appears that Commissioner Powell has traded more deregulation for still more deregulation.

ALICIA MUNDY: And won completely! He's, he's got Kevin Martin's vote now! They have the 3 votes they need. Martin wanted the rule against cross ownership eliminated entirely, so the fact that there is any remaining ban against newspaper cross ownership in the smaller markets is a testament to Mr. Powell being able to horse trade something, but in return for that, the national network ownership cap will go up to 45 percent.

BOB GARFIELD: So what does it mean that the ownership cap for networks is going to 45 percent versus the existing 35 percent? Is, is it going to make any difference to anybody?

ALICIA MUNDY: Oh, yes, because Fox right now and Viacom, that's CBS, are both interested in buying other stations out there, and right now with this rule going, they could be allowed to reach almost half the country, and so for instance if your local station wants to, say, pre-empt the national network feed of Friends some night, God forbid, because there's a local debate or a local high school game, that won't be able to happen any more because your local station will be owned by Mr. Big Network.

BOB GARFIELD: Politics it is often said makes strange bedfellows, and no stranger than some of the alliances that we've seen here. Tell me about Fritz Hollings and Ted Stevens, for example.

ALICIA MUNDY: Fritz is a liberal Democrat. Ted Stevens is a conservative Republican, but they've both banded together to introduce a bill to keep the network cap at 35 percent. Now they don't stand a chance of a snowball in Haiti's getting that bill passed, but it creates a lot of problems for the Republicans. There's one more strange alliance going on here, and that is the National Rifle Association has thrown its weight in against deregulating the media ownership rules. This is very weird, because this week a group of Women for Peace are going to be picketing the FCC and pink-slipping it -- throwing pink slips of paper all over the FCC, complaining that they don't believe in deregulation. So you have the pink-slip Women for Peace basically marching with the National Rifle Association here and Ted Stevens marching with Senator Hollings, and you know I just don't know if I can cover it all.

BOB GARFIELD: [LAUGHS] There's a lot of entertaining politics going on, but it doesn't seem to me that this is an issue that has yet gotten traction with the American people. Is there any chance that in the final weeks of the battle that the public itself will somehow get energized about this or will it be a genuinely obscure inside-the-Beltway fight to the very end?

ALICIA MUNDY: I think it will be up to the two Democratic commissioners, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein. They are certainly going to do their best, along with the public interest proponents to make this a national issue, to force feed the national networks these stories, and if they can convince the networks that this is a national news story that they have to run even though it may be flying in the face of the networks' economic interest, you might get some reverberations among the public, but I think by and large it's going to stay a Beltway story, and in the end, we'll be talking to each other on June 3rd about the vote that took place the day before.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, Alicia. As always, thank you very much.

ALICIA MUNDY: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Alicia Mundy is a senior editor for Cable World Magazine and also a contributor to Editor & Publisher, Adweek and almost every other magazine that I can think of. [MUSIC]