Leadership Quote by Michael K. Powell

Powell’s line is a neat little trap disguised as candor. By daring his audience to “Name all six of them,” he turns a policy fight into a pop quiz, then uses the inevitable silence as proof that the fight was never really about policy. It’s a politician’s way of saying: you’re arguing from vibes, not from text.

The specific intent is defensive and delegitimizing. Powell isn’t merely lamenting ignorance; he’s trying to reframe the debate over media ownership rules as a performative moral panic - heat without light. The phrase “to be perfectly candid” functions like a rhetorical credential, inviting trust while he pivots to an attack on the opposition’s seriousness. “What scared me” is also strategic: it casts him as the responsible adult alarmed by the democratic process itself, not just by the outcome.

Subtext: the public is being mobilized by slogans and intermediaries. In the FCC context of the early 2000s, “ownership rules” weren’t dinner-table material; they were technical guardrails shaping who could own what, how much consolidation was allowed, and how localism and competition were supposed to survive. Powell’s point isn’t wrong, but it’s also self-serving. Complexity becomes a shield: if only experts can recite the rules, then only experts should get to steer them.

What makes the quote work is the inversion. Instead of defending the rules on their merits, he questions the legitimacy of the people contesting them. It’s a critique of civic literacy that doubles as a power move: narrowing the field of acceptable dissent to those fluent in the bureaucracy’s language.