The Rocky's Nov. 18 editorial on media consolidation ("FCC chief misfires on media ownership") missed the bigger story about how Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin's unprecedented bid to annex legislative authority through a questionable interpretation of a 1980s legal clause could help him push through an anti-diversity agenda that would devastate opportunities for minority media ownership.

For starters, some FCC bureaucrats continue to push new a la carte regulations, in which the government would mandate consumers to pay a per-channel charge for every cable channel. Nearly every civil rights organization and virtually every single study has said that these regulations would destroy opportunities for new minority and other programmers by depriving them of the scale, market penetration or advertising achieved from tiered bundles.

Moreover, some FCC commissioners want to extend the so-called "multicast must-carry" rules by giving each local broadcaster as many as six channels that cable carriers will be required to provide subscribers . This giveaway to well-heeled television station owners would effectively squeeze out channel space on cable TV that could otherwise be used for emerging new minority programmers.

And the suggestion that minority programmers lease a portion of these multicast must-carry channels from the large, mostly nonminority broadcasters prompted one FCC commissioner to deride the idea as "media sharecropping."

There is virtually no political support from either Democrats or Republicans on this anti-diversity agenda. Yet it seems that some bureaucrats inside the FCC are dead set on using a proceeding called the 7 0/70 rule to implement wholesale policy changes that hurt consumers and hurt minority television programmers. Congress needs to step in and provide some supervision.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. is president and founder of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition in Washington, D.C.