Michael Copps was honored by about a dozen former FCC...

communications issues means “there remains a Copps on the beat,” said FCC Chief of Staff Zac Katz. Commissioner Mignon Clyburn said she hopes, like Copps, “we should all disagree without being disagreeable.” Republican Commissioner Robert McDowell noted that he and Copps voted the same way on all issues during the latter’s six-month tenure as acting chairman in the first half of 2009. During that period, which overlapped with the switch from analog by all U.S. full-power TV stations, the digital transition was “seamless as it could be, for anybody,” said Jonathan Adelstein, a Democratic FCC member then who now runs the Rural Utilities Service. “We tried to change the arc of the media in this country, toward localism.” For Kathleen Abernathy, a Republican commissioner during the first four years of Copps’ tenure, he was “a worthy opponent,” she said at the event organized by the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council. “That’s a good thing -- it means that people are passionate about what they believe in.” Gloria Tristani, who left the FCC as a Democratic commissioner a few months after Copps arrived in 2001, called him “Mr. Public Interest.” Copps, who left the commission Dec. 31, said trying to reach decisions where the public interest is served means “very much to me,” and “when we disagree, we agree to disagree,” something Washington doesn’t have but needs.