Did McCain Lean on FCC Commissioner on Iseman's Behalf?

[kpete]

So, did the Times miss the real story in their recent reporting on Iseman: McCain leveraging his position as commission chair to help convince Ness to vote in favor of Iseman's client's TV deal?

Did McCain Lean on FCC Commissioner on Iseman's Behalf?
By Zachary Roth - August 26, 2008, 6:09PM

Remember that New York Times story from February that didn't quite deliver the goods about John McCain's entanglement with the lobbyist Vicki Iseman?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/us/politics/21mccain.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&hp&oref=slogin
Well, there was one strand to the Times' reporting that was lost amid the unproven allegations of a sexual relationship. But the Times' own earlier reporting from 2000, as well as what TPMmuckraker has learned, suggests it deserves some attention.

Towards the end of the February story, the Times wrote about McCain's assistance to Iseman's client, Lowell Paxson, who ran the media company Paxson Communications:

In late 1999, Ms. Iseman asked Mr. McCain's staff to send a letter to the commission to help Paxson, now Ion Media Networks, on another matter. Mr. Paxson was impatient for F.C.C. approval of a television deal, and Ms. Iseman acknowledged in an e-mail message to The Times that she had sent to Mr. McCain's staff information for drafting a letter urging a swift decision.

Mr. McCain complied. He sent two letters to the commission, drawing a rare rebuke for interference from its chairman.

But it turns out that the Times had covered this before. Back in January 2000, Stephen Labaton, one of the four Times scribes on the Iseman story from this February, had reported on McCain's help for Paxson.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE4D6143BF935A35752C0A9669C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
Paxson, Labaton wrote, had lent McCain his corporate jet four times in the last year, and had scheduled a Florida fundraiser for McCain (which was subsequently cancelled); and McCain had received more than $20,000 in contributions from Paxson Communications executives.

And Labaton added something even more interesting:

The commissioners who approved the transfer were two Republicans and a Democrat, Susan Ness, who was been known for some time as the swing vote and whose nomination for a second term is now before the Senate Commerce Committee.

Ms. Ness said in an interview today that the rules prohibited her from talking about her deliberations in the Pittsburgh case and that as a matter of policy, she has declined to discuss her pending confirmation.

"I always vote in my decisions based on the law and the facts before us and anyone who knows my record knows that," she said.

According to a former F.C.C. staffer, Ness rarely broke with her Democratic colleagues, as she did on this vote. The former staffer added that being appointed to a second term as an F.C.C. commissioner was unusual at the time -- most commissioners served only one term -- and that Ness was actively campaigning for her re-appointment. The Atlantic's Joshua Green, who wrote about this in March, judged that "Ness's vote is widely thought to have been a bid to win her reappointment to the FCC."

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