Former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps criticized the FCC...

and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. Calling the FCC “AWOL” from its oversight duties, Copps said policies favoring media consolidation have created “a media environment in which a handful of huge conglomerates have gobbled up so many previously diverse and once independent outlets ... that the civic dialogue we must nourish to preserve self-government has been dumbed down beyond recognition.” In the article -— entitled “The New Telecom Oligarchs” -- Copps also discussed his dissenting vote in the 2011 Comcast/NBC Universal merger and attacked President Barack Obama for failing to fulfill campaign promises to stop media consolidation. Copps wrote that Obama’s public stance on media mergers “got short shrift in the commission’s four-to-one approval of the Comcast-NBCU behemoth.” Copps said FCC policies have led to the U.S. becoming “the only country on earth that short-circuited broadband development through a tedious, mistaken and totally unnecessary exercise in linguistic analysis.” Copps cited an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development ranking that lists the U.S. as “fifteenth in the world in getting broadband out to all our people.” The former commissioner also heaped praise on Crawford’s book, and pointed to Captive Audience as an example of something threatened by media consolidation: “Investigative journalism hangs by the slenderest of threads ... without vibrant media that dig for facts and tell truth to the American people, we don’t have a shot at resolving the many challenges our country confronts.”