As the editors of Time debate over the candidates for its 2004 Person of the Year winner/cover, The Boston Globe has put forth its suggestion that FCC Chairman Michael Powell be named this year's winner. The criteria for the final selection states that the individual or individuals be those that "most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or worse."

The paper contends that Powell's feud with the soon-to-be satellite radio personality Howard Stern, the litany of indecency fines levied against terrestrial radio before and after Janet Jackson's nipple made its debut on national television, the skittish decision by ABC television affiliates not to air Saving Private Ryan on Veteran's Day, and more recently the Terrell Owens-Nicollette Sheridan flap - an incident that has made the FCC consider opening up an investigation that may end with a fine against ABC, makes Powell the perfect choice. The Globe states that "no individual this year has had a greater effect on our cultural lives -- for good or ill, for better or worse -- than Powell."

The article, written by Globe staffer Renée Graham, contends that "no FCC chairman in recent memory has wielded as much influence as Powell in his self-appointed role as America's parent, the man ready to snatch away our remote controls. It's one thing to punish a network for an actual offense, but quite another to stir up such a climate of fear and recrimination that stations are nervously pulling worthwhile programming before it even airs. Saving Private Ryan is just the beginning." 

Graham also asks, "Is it too cynical to believe that what really offended some was the notion of a film, with its graphic depictions of battle, coming into American homes just as US troops were engaged in their most recent offensive in Fallujah?"

"In Iowa and Nebraska," she continues, "instead of Spielberg's World War II epic, several ABC affiliates showed the TV movie Return to Mayberry. Somehow, the selection of that film hardly seems a coincidence. It could certainly serve as a sad commentary on the archaic mind-set the FCC's restrictive rules is promoting, with Powell as an overbearing Barney Fife with too much power and too little desire to use it beyond fostering his own myopic cultural and political agenda."