We were very pleasantly surprised to learn that the FCC's newest commissioner, Robert McDowell, is planning to attend a town hall meeting on media ownership in Columbus, Ohio next week. McDowell's decision to attend the next in a series of such town hall meetings means that a majority of the agency's five commissioners will be present for the first time.

The Federal Communications Commission took a page from "The Godfather" movies in getting Spanish language broadcasting behemoth Univision to quietly accept a $24 million fine for skirting requirements to air educational programming for children. The agency made Univision an offer it couldn't refuse.

This one comes from the "you have got to be kidding me" file. The National Association of Broadcasters has sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission requesting that viewers and listeners who speak at the agency's public hearings on media ownership be required to disclose where they live. NAB says this disclosure is needed to "help ensure that the Commissioners hear from viewers and listeners who actually receive service from stations in the local markets where the hearings are being conducted."

Private equity firms have developed a lust for publicly-owned media companies in recent months. All these deals raise some very troubling questions, which Columbia University Professor Eli Noam lays out in a new article in the Financial Times.

Like lots of folks, we aren't yet sure what to think about the bombshell announcement by satellite radio competitors XM and Sirius that they want to merge. At first blush, it's hard to imagine how such a business marriage would benefit average consumers -- the primary yardstick this blog uses to measure a big deal like this.

No matter how you cut it, the United States is not the world's superpower in broadband Internet service. So says a new article in Information Week magazine, which runs through a lengthy laundry list of measurements for broadband -- penetration rates, speed, cost -- and comes to the uncomfortable conclusion that the U.S. now trails many other countries when it comes to broadband. The article also makes a strong case the U.S. is falling further behind with each passing day.

As I write this, Federal Communications Chairman Kevin Martin should be on his way down to Captol Hill to have a closed-door, "members-only" meeting with legislators who oversee his agency. "Members-only" does not adequately convey the exclusivity of this particular meeting, however. Only Republican members of the House Telecommunications Subcommittee will be admitted. Democrats on the subcommittee will not be welcome. Nor will the press or the public.