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

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. A vote on a radical change in the rules governing media ownership is just two weeks away, prompting the two Democratic FCC commissioners, Michael Cops and Jonathan Adelstein, to ask for a postponement.

Chairman Powell, in defiance of a long-standing commission tradition,

turned them down Friday.

It was a last-ditch attempt to stall the commission from taking an action

that could affect what the rest of us see and hear on TV and radio.

O'TEM's Paul Ingalls reports.

The rules, limiting multiple ownership, have always been intended to promote a diversity of voices on the public airwaves

and to prevent single owners from controlling too much news and entertainment programming.

In recent years, some media companies have successfully appealed the restrictions,

and the courts have demanded that the FCC proved the harm it says will come if restrictions were lifted.

The FCC in some sense is being forced by the courts to prove a negative.

Blair Levin is former chief of staff at the FCC and now a media analyst for Leg Mason Financial Services firm.

The problem for the FCC is if you look at the totality of all these decisions,

it creates, shall we say, an obstacle course. And I think it actually makes it rather difficult

to sustain the FCC's traditional views that we should apply something of a common sense

rule here to simply prohibit transactions which we believe would result in less diversity in the media.

If the FCC is to make any ownership restrictions hold up in court then,

it must be able to point to convincing data showing that the consolidation touched off by the easing of limits in 1996

has meant less diversity, less localism, and less competition.

FCC chairman Michael Powell, on record as a skeptic of the limits,

had a special task force gathered data on the effects of existing ownership limits

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