Powell addressed the controversy over the loosening of ownership rules by saying, "We're required to review rules at a very high, ruthless standard. A lot of the rules, which are 30 or 35 years old, are difficult empirically to justify in the current environment. There's really only one rule that everybody's talking about — the national ownership cap, which most people think means we let you own 45 percent of the country. It's only audience reach, right? You don't explain to me why satellite can reach 100 percent or cable can reach 100 percent, but broadcast uniquely only reaches 45 percent. If you listen carefully to the debate about ownership, there's always a quiet struggle going on, just like there is in any antitrust case is: how do you define the market? We did the work, we did the research; this market is not concentrated in antitrust terms."

Powell claims that the ownership debate is not really about the ownership rules, saying, "The vast majority of people don't even know what the rules say, to be perfectly candid. Name all six of them. Name what they actually do. Nobody can. They became a stalking horse for a debate about the role of media in our society. I can expect and understand consumer anger and anxiety about that. But the ownership rules are not the cause or the cure. It was really an invitation for people with particular viewpoints to push for a thumb on the scale, for content in a direction that people preferred."

Powell accuses some of the people who hold those "particular viewpoints" of hypocrisy, saying, "It's easy to say, 'I'm comfortable with that when the government's doing it for something I like. But I get really scared when it's something I don't.' And what is juxtaposed against the media ownership debate? Indecency, which maybe is what you mean by content. Hollywood was happy to beat up on ownership liberalization because they want the government to intervene so we can promote more independent programming — which is content. But the same Hollywood says the government can't say that Howard Stern can't say the F word, because that's censorship and inappropriate."

Powell defended the indecency crackdown, saying, "First of all, there's a separate response for indecency, since Congress has passed a statute and the Supreme Court upheld it. So I don't have any choice other than to believe that it is a constitutionally permissible restriction that the people, through their representatives, have imposed as a matter of law. But if you're outraged by that, you've got to be principled all the way through. You can't pick when it aligns with your interest and then scream about it when it doesn't. We wouldn't have had as much steam in the media ownership debate if Rupert Murdoch hadn't come into the world. Conservatives were griping for decades about liberal media and nobody paid attention. Now, all of a sudden, one news channel has gotten a whole new community of people freaked out."