Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin told an audience at telecom conference in Washington yesterday that consumers should be able to pick and choose the different cable channels they receive, an approach commonly called “cable a la carte.”

We wholeheartedly agree.

Cable companies now offer “tiers” of service, bundling up groups of channels of their choosing. That means that consumers are forced to buy a bunch of channels they probably will never watch in order to get the ones they really want.

Martin has been a frequent critic of the tier system and we think his comments yesterday were particularly strong.

Besides endorsing cable a la carte, he also said cable companies should have to disclose the wholesale price they are paying for each channel.

“I think that at the very least, we should be able to have a transparency…how much each of those channels is costing, so we are able to see what those costs are,” Martin told the conference.

Amen and attaboy on that too. Consumers deserve no less.

We are much less enthusiastic about the venue where Martin chose to make his remarks yesterday.

His comments came at the Practising Law Institute’s Telecommunications & Policy conference. The audience was communication lawyers, a group that overwhelmingly makes their living lobbying the FCC on behalf big telecommunication and media companies.

You can view the program for the conference by clicking here.

It’s one of those “insider” types of conferences where the FCC commissioners and top agency officials are routinelyfeatured to attract attendees.

Martin made his comments during a conversation-type session at the conference with Richard Wiley, a former FCC chairman himself who is now one of the top telecommunication lobbyist/lawyers in the country. You can click here to see his biography.

Wiley was one of four co-chairman of the conference. Two of them – Henry Rivera and Kathleen Abernathy – like Wiley are former FCC commissioners-turned-lobbyists.

Although he was the headliner, Martin was certainly not the only top FCC official scheduled to appear at the conference. Also on the program were FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Robert McDowell. So were several of the top agency’s top bureaucrats – including Thomas J. Navin, Chief, Wireline Competition Bureau; and Catherine W. Seidel, Acting Bureau Chief, Wireless Telecommunications Bureau – which the program promised would be presenting “tutorials” for attendees.

We don’t think these kinds of conferences are appropriate for FCC officals, particularly when top regulators are presenting “tutorials” to the folks they are supposed to be regulating.

We note that this conference was generally open to the press, if not the public.

That wasn’t the case with an investor conference featuring many of the same FCC officials which we blogged about recently. That one was strictly a private affair, with an Associated Press reporter being ordered out when he tried to crash the party.