From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. The 108th Congress has just begun, and the change in party leadership could have serious consequences for regulating media. Maybe.

On the Senate side, the chairman of the Commerce Committee that oversees a lot of these issues has moved from Fritz

Hollings to the unpredictable but always interesting Arizona Republican John McCain.

Alicia Mundy is senior editor for Cable World Magazine and she joins us now. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Now in a recent article, you made a glancing reference to McCain's, shall we say, distractability.

Is it possible to tell yet what his chief priorities will be in this area?

Well, those of us who have covered him on media issues over the years, we've always been fascinated by what seems to be attention deficit syndrome on McCain's part.

You know, one week he's sort of screaming about media consolidation,

and the next week he's saying, let's remove all the regulations and let two companies

buy everything in sight. But I think he will get rid of the regulation banning a broadcast

station in one town from also owning a newspaper in that same town. Now, the trouble is Hollings was very much against removing

that. He was very concerned about the power of one media mogul to co-opt an entire market. I think

this has been something the Democrats have been terrified will happen. Nonetheless, the Democrats aren't

in power anymore, and I think this rule is going to go down and you're going to just see a lot of ownership of both newspapers and broadcast stations in the same cities resulting.

And so on the issue of newspaper broadcast cross-ownership, McCain would seem to stand mostly with his Republican colleagues.

Are there any of his positions that would pull against that majority?

I think he disagrees with a number of his colleagues on the issue of the network ownership cap.

In the past, he said, let's let an individual network own so many stations that they can reach more than 35% of the American audience.

He has said that he was in favor of raising that rule in the past. I think now he's

become very concerned about the effects of what he sees in media consolidation. McCain really

no longer wants to see the networks get the kind of cap raise that they'd like. They'd like

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