On the walls next to the stage in the Glenn Miller Ballroom at the University of Colorado are two enormous black and white pictures.  The one on the left is of Glenn Miller himself, horn-rimmed glasses, looking over his shoulder, trombone in his left hand, ready to play at any moment. The one on the right is the first page from the manuscript of a Glenn Miller tune -- I think it must be Moonlight Serenade, the signature with which the Miller band famously signed on and signed off their radio broadcasts for many many years.  When you knew the Glenn Miller Band was coming, you knew this tune was coming.

Today Michael Powell spoke from the stage in this room, and he seemed very anxious about the amount of choice in the world.  (He said many interesting things, but I'm seizing on this theme for the moment.)

He said (paraphrasing here):  "My argument is that the problem with media is not concentration, it's hypercompetition.  We're fragmenting media, so we're getting 'me tv.'  Do we really want this much diversity?  This is a social problem.  We are losing community.  In the Walter Cronkite area, because the media market was so concentrated we had a communal media experience -- we had no choice but to talk about the previous night's broadcast.  Our minds were opened because we had to listen to stories we might not have chosen to hear."

He went on:  "Fox news is always on for my father in law.  Now every one of us can reinforce our preconceived biases.  I can tailor my internet news, go to places that only traffic in my biases.  Ironically, this is splintering our country.  We are making our own world, and we don't have a shared experience.  Media regulation is premised on the idea of scarcity, but what do you do in an era of abundance?  Does anyone really think there's scarcity any more?"

He broadened the theme, talking about how overwhelming the choices available are.  "I have no idea what's in my iPod.  You don't want 25K songs.  You want the songs and pictures you care about.  Maybe there is too much diversity, too little community, media is too influenced by the political environment."

He finished by saying, "Until we get our metrics coherent, until we decide what we care about as a country, these media issues are explosive and unsolvable in a public policy sense."

Now, you could read this in two different ways.  Maybe his assumption is that regulation should help people deal with this diversity and insist on making different sources of information available.  Maybe he's signaling that vertical integration of media platforms (eg, broadband) is absolutely fine because it may help people bump into different sources and deal with overload.  Or maybe he'd like to see greater federal support for public television as an alternative source of news.  Can't tell. 

But former Chairman Powell is perplexed by the amount of choice in the world.  He's worried (a later answer made this clear) that children are afraid of failure rather than hoping to succeed.  He's worried that we can tailor our experience too much.  He is worried about our collective future, and he's not necessarily saying that regulation of any kind is the answer. 

He certainly misses Walter Cronkite, whose voice provided a Glenn Miller signature-tune like constancy to his childhood.