FCC chair Julius Genachowski has certainly been busy. This week, of course, he’s been occupied with regulating the Internet. But last week, he was busy fending off charges on talk radio and elsewhere that the FCC has its very own “speech” or “diversity” czar.
At issue was the appointment in August of ex-journalist and Center for American Progress fellow Mark Lloyd to be the agency’s “chief diversity officer.” That appointment instantly caused controversy, with Lloyd has becoming a cause celebre on conservative talk radio and in the blogoshere, where he was been portrayed as yet another in a long line of powerful and unaccountable Obama policy czars and – in light of his support of government regulation of TV and radio content – a threat to free speech. Nationally syndicated talk show host Glenn Beck led the charge, at one point twittering his listeners: “Watch Dogs: FIND OUT EVERYTHING YOU CAN” about Lloyd and several other “czars.”
But the critics had their facts wrong. Lloyd was never chosen to be a “czar” of anything. That regal title – and its connotations of unlimited influence — were entirely invented by overactive imaginations in the media. Lloyd’s actual position in the FCC bureaucracy is much more prosaic — “associate general counsel.” He serves in that position along with three other associate general counsel, and three deputy general counsels. Anyone who’s worked at the FCC knows that is an unlikely locus of power.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.