Capitol Hill is swarming with lobbyists in a war over the future of information services-pitting the Baby Bells and their allies against the nation’s newspapers, AT&T, and their broad coalition.

IT WAS A NICE FIT

Thomas Hale Boggs, Jr., premier Washington lobbyist, was co-hosting a duck-hunting party at his farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore for House Democratic leaders and moneymen. Some of his old buddies would be there, among them Congressmen John Dingell and Jack Brooks, the two committee chairmen whose help would be most critical to Boggs’s new client, the American Newspaper Publishers Association.

So Boggs brought along a new friend: James Cox Kennedy, chairman and CEO of his family’s Cox Enterprises, Inc., the $2 billion-a-year media empire based in Atlanta.

The 44-year-old newspaper-cable-broadcasting baron and the 51-year-old, $1.5 million-a-year senior partner atPatton, Boggs & Blow had met a few weeks before at an ANPA board meeting in New York. Kennedy is a key player in the ANPA’s desperate push for legislation this year to shield newspapers from competition by the seven "Baby Bell" telephone monopolies in the burgeoning field of electronic publishing-the provision of information ser¨vices through telephone technology.

Kennedy was also to the duck blind born, so to speak: A scion of one of America’s ten richest families, he has a hunting lodge of his own and is a crack shot-"one of the best I’ve ever seen," Boggs says.

FOR THOSE WHO TUNED IN LATE

This is the second article in a two-part series on a multimillion-dollar litigation-lobbying extravaganza in which opponents of the seven Baby Bell telephone monopolies are bidding to kick the Bells out of electronic publishing and keep them out of the long distance and telephone manufacturing markets-or at least restrict their access.

As described in Part 1, in the April issue, the current debate is grounded in the antitrust suits brought by the Justice Department and MCI against AT&T. Those actions led to the 1982 consent decree requiring the divestiture of the Baby Bells and their local phone monopolies, and a ban on Bell entry into markets that they would have incentives to monopolize-information services, long distance, and manufacturing.

Beginning with private contacts between Bell lobbyists and top Justice Department officials in 1985, the department suddenly and with little explanation abandoned the barriers against Bell entry into information services and manufacturing that it had crafted in 198This flip-flop and a disastrous miscalculation by AT&T led to an extraordinary series of court decisions that began unraveling the decree and freed the Bells to enter the electronic publishing market last October.

These litigation losses forced Bell opponents, especially the newspapers and other electronic publishers, to mount a desperate push for legislation-this year, if possible-to save them from the Bells.

"I am an avid hunter," Kennedy notes when queried about the Boggshosted expedition,’ ‘and I think some of those guys are also. It’s just a chance to get together in an informal environment."

Yes, indeed. The kind of chance that could be worth a lot to those who, like the ANPA, are in a big hurry to move a bill through Brooks’s Judiciary Committee and Dingell’s Energy and Commerce Committee.

Kennedy says he did not bring up the ANPA’s legislative aspirations with Dingell or Brooks in the duck blinds they shared that Monday and Tuesday, December 16 and 17, 1991. He stresses that the outing "was a large group," of 20 or more.

Just a nice, friendly getaway blasting birds out of the sky.

And a successful one: "I think everybody got some ducks," says Kennedy, who had a brief stint as outdoors-colum-nist-cum-crown-prince-in-waiting at the Atlanta newspapers 20 years ago and is still remembered for showing off his guns in the newsroom and for his trips to the roof to tend the pigeons he kept to train his bird dog, Rupert.

Pressed for details about the outing with Boggs, Dingell, Brooks, et al., Kennedy suggests, "Why don’t you call Tommy Boggs? It was his party."

Well, not exactly, Boggs explains, with good-natured reluctance. It was "The Speaker’s Club’s" party, an annual hunt put on by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for large donors who want to hobnob with House bigshots in relaxed settings.

There was an afternoon shoot on the Boggs farm, about 12 miles south of Cambridge, Maryland, followed by "cocktails at my place, dinner at J.D. ‘s place, then the morning shoot and we go home." (That’s J.D. Williams, one of the handful of other lawyer-lobbyists whose fame and fortune rival Boggs’s.)

"I invited Jim Kennedy to try to entice him to join The Speaker’s Club," Boggs explains. Did he? Boggs presumes so. How does one get in? "One contributes money."

Boggs suggests calling the DCCC for details on The Speaker’s Club.

Well, it wasn’t exactly The Speaker’s Club’s party, DCCC executive director Les Francis explains. This duck hunt was hosted by the DCCC’s "Chairmen’s Council," co-chaired by Chairmen Dingell and Brooks. And Kennedy had not joined. "He just happened to be there as a guest of Tommy’s…. It was not as an enticer to join anything."

Boggs’s confusion is understandable. A longtime Speaker’s Club stalwart, he and his wife Barbara have given more than $200,000 in campaign contributions since 1985, mostly to incumbent House Democrats like Dingell and Brooks, according to Federal Election Commission records. His law firm has given another $28,500 in "soft money" since 1989.

After a while, all the "clubs" and "councils" must start running together.

FINANCIAL FRONTING: PAY YOUR ANTE

According to DCCC literature, The Speaker’s Club’s annual dues are $10,000 in personal or political action committee money, or $15,000 in "corporate, union, and trade association funds"-which the DCCC calls "nonfederal" money, most people call "soft money," and New York Times editorialists call "sewer money." In other words, the DCCC tells prospective donors, "We’ll take any kind of money you want to send us, but if it’s soft money, please send more."

The Chairmen’s Council costs less: $2,500 in personal money, $5,000 in PAC money, or $10,000 in soft money. "It’s a better deal than The Speaker’s Club," says one member with a laugh. "Who cares about the Speaker anyway?" The Speaker, Tom Foley, has a lot of headlines and headaches. John Dingell and Jack Brooks have a lot of power to move legislation.

Such groups and their duck hunts, ski trips, golf tournaments, Superbowl outings, and issue briefings at which big donors mingle with bigshot politicians involve a peculiar Washington blend of money, conviviality, and hard-eyed lobbying strategy.

Asked whether he had brought his new ANPA client Kennedy along on the duck hunt because he was an old friend, Boggs says with a laugh, "He’s a new friend. Most of my old friends I have already solicited for The Speaker’s Club. And he’s a Democrat. They’re hard to find."

He’s not just any Democrat, either. Kennedy’s grandfather was James Middleton Cox, the Ohio press baron, governor, and 1920 Democratic presidential nominee, whose running mate was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Kennedy’s mother, Barbara Cox Anthony, and his aunt, Anne Cox Chambers, are the two richest women in America, controlling most of the $4 billion Cox fortune, including Cox Enterprises. Chambers, a Cox Enterprises board member who has given Democrats a bundle-a $100,000 contribution to the Democratic National Committee in 1988 alone was rewarded by Jimmy Carter with the ambassadorship to Belgium.

James Cox Kennedy, then, was a more obvious candidate for an overnight hunting party with the good old boys than, say, Cathleen Black, the ANPA’s new president and CEO. For all her formidable charm, the intense former ad saleswoman is a bit hard to picture chomping cigars with Jack Brooks and Tommy Boggs in a duck blind.

"I didn’t even think about her," Boggs confesses. One reason was that "it would cost her her own money, because ANPA doesn’t have a PAC."

Any other reasons? "She would say that I didn’t think of her because she’s a woman," Boggs chuckles, "and I guess she’s partially right. But I am learning."

Boggs stresses that occasions like the duck hunt are not lobbying opportunities but good clean fun, with "virtually no business discussed." Virtually.

He does not speculate on what, if any, impact such fine fellowship while massacring mallards might have on the future of electronic publishing.

The effect could well be zero. Dingell and Brooks are serious men, not about to save the publishers from the Baby Bells just because the ANPA’s top lobbyist is a mainstay of the Democratic money machine. And both chairmen play this game to win. They don’t go out on limbs to do people favors.

Indeed, when it comes to anteing up for a prime seat at the public policy poker table, the ANPA is a piker. It doesn’t even have a PAC, a fact often alluded to by lobbyists on the electronic publishing issue as an obvious handicap. "The best thing they have going for them," says a lobbyist allied with the publishers but unimpressed with their political acumen, "is, they buy their ink by the barrel."

The PACs of the seven Bells and their subsidiaries, by comparison, have spent over $8 million on campaign contributions and other political activities in the five years from 1987 through 1991, according to the Almanac of Federal PACs and FEC records. While only fragmentary numbers are available for 1992, it’s almost certain the Bells will give more during the current lobbying battle than in any prior year. Another generous source of campaign money is the union representing Bell blue-collar workers, the Communications Workers of America, whose PAC has spent more than $5 million since 1987.

And Dingell and Brooks have both gotten far more money from the Bells’ PACs-$56,380 for Dingell and $26,500 for Brooks since 1987-than they have from Tommy Boggs and all of the nation’s newspapers combined.

All this is much appreciated by the recipients. So are the individual gifts to politicians by top Baby Bell executives since their companies were born in 1984, out of the 1982 consent decree that spun them and their local telephone monopolies off from the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Inc.

On a snowy day in 1992, Boggs sits in his office with a cigar explaining to a reporter that "helping members of Congress raise funds is a very important part of operating in Washington."

Why? "Because," he says softly and deliberately, "it’s an incredible burden on them to have to raise as much money as they have to raise to get reelected, and anyone who can help them save some time is important to them."

The conventional wisdom is that the kind of systematic campaign contributing done by Washington lobbyists like Boggs and by industries like the Bells gets them "access" to policymakers, not necessarily votes. It buys them seats at the table, not winning hands.

"There is also a hope of some PACs that they can get the best cards in the deck," says one congressman. "That’s why they don’t spend any money on challengers and they give money almost exclusively to incumbent members of the committees with jurisdiction over their issues. They won’t waste money on people who can’t help them."

THE CABLE CONNECTION: A STRATEGIC PUNT

The Bells got access to John Dingell the last week in February, when he received a small delegation headed by William Weiss, chairman and CEO of Ameritech Corporation, the Chicago-based Bell whose wires crisscross Dingell’s home state of Michigan, and whose PAC always remembers him at election time.

Ameritech’s private visit to Dingell’s office was prompted in part by a very public Judiciary Committee hearing the week before, on February 19, at which the Bells took a pasting from chairman Jack Brooks.

A Texas populist and longtime critic of the telephone monopolies, Brooks had threatened the Bells with tight antitrust curbs and had ridden hard on Ivan Seidenberg, the NYNEX Corporation vice-chairman who testified for the Bells.

Between puffs on his cigar, Brooks had suggested he might seek to overturn key aspects of a series of judicial rulings that freed the Bells to enter the potentially enormous field of electronic publishing last October, with no new safeguards against using their local phone monopolies to strangle competitors.

Brooks had also pressed the ANPA, AT&T, MCI Communications Corporation, the $20 billion cable industry, the Consumer Federation of America, and others in the broad anti-Bell coalition that had been galvanized by the court rulings to band together to counteract the Bells’ lobbying muscle, and to bury past squabbles.

With the newspapers and many electronic information service providers "on death row," as a House staffer puts it a tad hyperbolically, publishers and their allies and lobbyists have been swarming Capitol Hill in waves clamoring for Congress to save them from Bell competition and monopolization. The anti-Bell coalition’s "Unity Statement" now includes more than 1,000 companies and consumer groups all over America as signatories.

The Bells are swarming the Hill with equal intensity. Their opinion of Brooks slipped out-too baldly for their own good, some astonished House staffers say-when Ameritech’s top lobbyist, John Connarn, bashed Brooks in March in an interview with The Washington Post for "doing the bidding of our adversaries," and said that Brooks’s February 19 hearing "gave a good name to kangaroo courts."

Not very diplomatic. Might this suggest that Brooks should expect less in Bell PAC donations in the future? Time will tell.

While the Bells now see Brooks as their most potent antagonist, they look to his old and dear friend and hunting companion Dingell as their first line of defense. Unlike Brooks, Dingell has long seemed sympathetic (although not clearly committed) to the Bells’ efforts to break the AT&T consent decree’s ban on Bell entry into the manufacturing, electronic publishing, and long distance markets.

And if Brooks’s hearing was a kangaroo court, then the 6-foot-3-inch, 220-pound Dingell’s audience with Ameritech’s Weiss and Connarn on February 26 was more akin to a king receiving his vassals, suggesting how they might comport themselves if they wished his grace to shine on them.

They were accompanied by Morton Barr, a top official of the Communications Workers of America, the union for most of the Bells’ blue-collar employees. Also present was David Leach, Dingell’s top telecommunications adviser.

The Ameritech officials asked Dingell, according to one source who was there and three others who weren’t, what action he foresaw this year on their three big issues: electronic publishing; a Senate-passed bill to erase the AT&T consent decree’s ban on phone manufacturing by the Bells; and the push by some of the Bells and other phone companies for so-called "cable-telco" legislation lifting the statutory ban on phone companies’ entering the cable business.

Dingell’s advice was clear: He didn’t expect the ANPA-backed proposals for restricting the Bells in electronic publishing to get far this year. But trouble on that front could arise if the phone companies were to persist in their efforts to hitch their cable-telco proposals onto the famously proconsumer bill to reregulate soaring cable television rates.

The cable rereg bill, which the Senate passed by 73 to 18 in January, is the most powerful locomotive to come along in years in the telecommunications field. Everyone from the ANPA to the broadcasters to the Bells would like to hitch a ride on it for their own pet proposals.

But Dingell wants to keep that bill clean and uncomplicated, House aides say. He and his fellow Democrats would love to pass it by a veto-proof margin, plunk it on President Bush’s desk just before the November elections, and dare him to brook the wrath of cable consumers by vetoing it.

"Dingell thought there was a lot of baggage on that bill already," says a person who was at this meeting with Ameritech. This source recalls Dingell saying that "if [the Bells] were to make efforts to get [cable-telco] legislation on there, that that vehicle would be opened up to other amendments regarding the telephone industry."

Like, for example, the ANPA-backed proposals to kick the Bells out of electronic publishing.

"He didn’t tell us what to do," a Bell official said after the Dingell-Weiss meeting, "but I didn’t just get off the bus yesterday."

Dingell, always a domineering presence, was telling the Bells what not to do if they value their now-unfettered access to the electronic publishing market.

The immediate result was to kill in its cradle a February 14 policy decision by the U.S. Telephone Association- which includes the seven Bells, the gigantic GTE Corporation, and many smaller phone companies-to hitch their cable-telco proposals to the rereg bill.

The Bells decided on a strategic punt for 1992 at a meeting of Bell CEOs on the day after the Ameritech-Dingell meeting, according to a Bell official. The CEOs were in Washington on other business.

"The deciding factor at the CEO meeting on the cable issue was Bill Weiss’s report on the Dingell meeting," the official says. "The perception was that Dingell had issued a warning. I don’t think he was saying, ‘If you do this, I will get you.’ It was more along the lines of, ‘Here are some things that might happen that you should consider.’ "

So the Bells will pursue cable-telco some other year. For 1992 they will play a defensive game. They won’t push Congress to do nice things for them, the better to stop Congress from doing bad things to them.

Dingell and Brooks, who is sponsoring a bill that would have to get past Dingell’s committee, might seem to be on a collision course. But these two masters of the game don’t like to collide. Some lobbyists suspect they may already privately have worked out some kind of compromise.

More likely, says an aide to one of them, Dingell and Brooks "will let the staffs slug it out for a while and then they’ll work something out before it gets too messy. There’s no rules. It’s all ad hoc, personalities, broken-field running, not like litigation at all."

And even powerful, old-fashioned chairmen like Brooks and Dingell don’t make policy in a vacuum. They float and weigh options. They prod opposing armies of lobbyists to present Congress with something digestible by building coalitions. They wait for the adversaries to test each other’s strength, fight preliminary skirmishes, and start making deals.

"The question is, who’s going to jump in bed with whom?" says a House staffer. "At some point the publishers and their allies may find it’s time to sit down and make some deals with the [Bells] before they get completely blown away by the courts. Congress can’t always bring people to the table. But if people are sitting at the table and John Dingell and Jack Brooks happen to walk through the door and see them, they say, ‘Well, what have we got here?’ "

At this writing, however, the newspapers are so far behind that they could hope for little more than a negotiated surrender if they were to seek a deal with the Bells. They are still trying to show enough momentum to get into the game.

BABY BELL BEHEMOTHS

The newspapers’ biggest problem is the sheer muscle of "the financially mighty and politically influential regional companies-in many areas the most powerful private entities extant," in the words of Harold Greene. He is the monopoly-busting U.S. district judge in Washington who has supervised the AT&T consent decree since 1982.

The seven Bells have $80 billion a year in revenues, compared with the newspapers’ $33 billion. They have $160 billion in assets. They had $8.2 billion in 1992 profits, more than any single U.S. company. And their profits are more or less guaranteed by their regulated monopoly status.

In contrast with the newspapers, the Bells are highly efficient at mobilizing their 500,000 employees to lobby legislators by phone, mail, and face-to-face-in shopping malls, bars, bowling alleys, chamber of commerce meetings, country clubs, and hospitality suites where executives hobnob at ratepayers’ expense.

Top Bell brass not only urge employees to contact congressional offices, they give them scripts of what to say [see sidebar].

"They have people at all levels… who are assigned to be the close contacts of public officials-mayors, county executives, state delegates, congressmen, governors, White House officials, you name it," says Representative Jim Cooper (D-Tennessee), a leading advocate of clamping restraints on the Bells. "Sometimes it’s a golf buddy, sometimes it’s a tennis buddy or a poker buddy or a drinking buddy, sometimes it’s a family friend."

"They have tentacles into every Rotary club, every school, every handicapped rights group, every bank board…

Capitol Hill is swarming with lobbyists in a war over the future of information services-pitting the Baby Bells and their allies against the nation’s newspapers, AT&T, and their broad coalition.

IT WAS A NICE FIT

Thomas Hale Boggs, Jr., premier Washington lobbyist, was co-hosting a duck-hunting party at his farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore for House Democratic leaders and moneymen. Some of his old buddies would be there, among them Congressmen John Dingell and Jack Brooks, the two committee chairmen whose help would be most critical to Boggs’s new client, the American Newspaper Publishers Association.

So Boggs brought along a new friend: James Cox Kennedy, chairman and CEO of his family’s Cox Enterprises, Inc., the $2 billion-a-year media empire based in Atlanta.

The 44-year-old newspaper-cable-broadcasting baron and the 51-year-old, $1.5 million-a-year senior partner atPatton, Boggs & Blow had met a few weeks before at an ANPA board meeting in New York. Kennedy is a key player in the ANPA’s desperate push for legislation this year to shield newspapers from competition by the seven "Baby Bell" telephone monopolies in the burgeoning field of electronic publishing-the provision of information ser¨vices through telephone technology.

Kennedy was also to the duck blind born, so to speak: A scion of one of America’s ten richest families, he has a hunting lodge of his own and is a crack shot-"one of the best I’ve ever seen," Boggs says.

FOR THOSE WHO TUNED IN LATE

This is the second article in a two-part series on a multimillion-dollar litigation-lobbying extravaganza in which opponents of the seven Baby Bell telephone monopolies are bidding to kick the Bells out of electronic publishing and keep them out of the long distance and telephone manufacturing markets-or at least restrict their access.

As described in Part 1, in the April issue, the current debate is grounded in the antitrust suits brought by the Justice Department and MCI against AT&T. Those actions led to the 1982 consent decree requiring the divestiture of the Baby Bells and their local phone monopolies, and a ban on Bell entry into markets that they would have incentives to monopolize-information services, long distance, and manufacturing.

Beginning with private contacts between Bell lobbyists and top Justice Department officials in 1985, the department suddenly and with little explanation abandoned the barriers against Bell entry into information services and manufacturing that it had crafted in 198This flip-flop and a disastrous miscalculation by AT&T led to an extraordinary series of court decisions that began unraveling the decree and freed the Bells to enter the electronic publishing market last October.

These litigation losses forced Bell opponents, especially the newspapers and other electronic publishers, to mount a desperate push for legislation-this year, if possible-to save them from the Bells.

"I am an avid hunter," Kennedy notes when queried about the Boggshosted expedition,’ ‘and I think some of those guys are also. It’s just a chance to get together in an informal environment."

Yes, indeed. The kind of chance that could be worth a lot to those who, like the ANPA, are in a big hurry to move a bill through Brooks’s Judiciary Committee and Dingell’s Energy and Commerce Committee.

Kennedy says he did not bring up the ANPA’s legislative aspirations with Dingell or Brooks in the duck blinds they shared that Monday and Tuesday, December 16 and 17, 1991. He stresses that the outing "was a large group," of 20 or more.

Just a nice, friendly getaway blasting birds out of the sky.

And a successful one: "I think everybody got some ducks," says Kennedy, who had a brief stint as outdoors-colum-nist-cum-crown-prince-in-waiting at the Atlanta newspapers 20 years ago and is still remembered for showing off his guns in the newsroom and for his trips to the roof to tend the pigeons he kept to train his bird dog, Rupert.

Pressed for details about the outing with Boggs, Dingell, Brooks, et al., Kennedy suggests, "Why don’t you call Tommy Boggs? It was his party."

Well, not exactly, Boggs explains, with good-natured reluctance. It was "The Speaker’s Club’s" party, an annual hunt put on by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for large donors who want to hobnob with House bigshots in relaxed settings.

There was an afternoon shoot on the Boggs farm, about 12 miles south of Cambridge, Maryland, followed by "cocktails at my place, dinner at J.D. ‘s place, then the morning shoot and we go home." (That’s J.D. Williams, one of the handful of other lawyer-lobbyists whose fame and fortune rival Boggs’s.)

"I invited Jim Kennedy to try to entice him to join The Speaker’s Club," Boggs explains. Did he? Boggs presumes so. How does one get in? "One contributes money."

Boggs suggests calling the DCCC for details on The Speaker’s Club.

Well, it wasn’t exactly The Speaker’s Club’s party, DCCC executive director Les Francis explains. This duck hunt was hosted by the DCCC’s "Chairmen’s Council," co-chaired by Chairmen Dingell and Brooks. And Kennedy had not joined. "He just happened to be there as a guest of Tommy’s…. It was not as an enticer to join anything."

Boggs’s confusion is understandable. A longtime Speaker’s Club stalwart, he and his wife Barbara have given more than $200,000 in campaign contributions since 1985, mostly to incumbent House Democrats like Dingell and Brooks, according to Federal Election Commission records. His law firm has given another $28,500 in "soft money" since 1989.

After a while, all the "clubs" and "councils" must start running together.

FINANCIAL FRONTING: PAY YOUR ANTE

According to DCCC literature, The Speaker’s Club’s annual dues are $10,000 in personal or political action committee money, or $15,000 in "corporate, union, and trade association funds"-which the DCCC calls "nonfederal" money, most people call "soft money," and New York Times editorialists call "sewer money." In other words, the DCCC tells prospective donors, "We’ll take any kind of money you want to send us, but if it’s soft money, please send more."

The Chairmen’s Council costs less: $2,500 in personal money, $5,000 in PAC money, or $10,000 in soft money. "It’s a better deal than The Speaker’s Club," says one member with a laugh. "Who cares about the Speaker anyway?" The Speaker, Tom Foley, has a lot of headlines and headaches. John Dingell and Jack Brooks have a lot of power to move legislation.

Such groups and their duck hunts, ski trips, golf tournaments, Superbowl outings, and issue briefings at which big donors mingle with bigshot politicians involve a peculiar Washington blend of money, conviviality, and hard-eyed lobbying strategy.

Asked whether he had brought his new ANPA client Kennedy along on the duck hunt because he was an old friend, Boggs says with a laugh, "He’s a new friend. Most of my old friends I have already solicited for The Speaker’s Club. And he’s a Democrat. They’re hard to find."

He’s not just any Democrat, either. Kennedy’s grandfather was James Middleton Cox, the Ohio press baron, governor, and 1920 Democratic presidential nominee, whose running mate was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Kennedy’s mother, Barbara Cox Anthony, and his aunt, Anne Cox Chambers, are the two richest women in America, controlling most of the $4 billion Cox fortune, including Cox Enterprises. Chambers, a Cox Enterprises board member who has given Democrats a bundle-a $100,000 contribution to the Democratic National Committee in 1988 alone was rewarded by Jimmy Carter with the ambassadorship to Belgium.

James Cox Kennedy, then, was a more obvious candidate for an overnight hunting party with the good old boys than, say, Cathleen Black, the ANPA’s new president and CEO. For all her formidable charm, the intense former ad saleswoman is a bit hard to picture chomping cigars with Jack Brooks and Tommy Boggs in a duck blind.

"I didn’t even think about her," Boggs confesses. One reason was that "it would cost her her own money, because ANPA doesn’t have a PAC."

Any other reasons? "She would say that I didn’t think of her because she’s a woman," Boggs chuckles, "and I guess she’s partially right. But I am learning."

Boggs stresses that occasions like the duck hunt are not lobbying opportunities but good clean fun, with "virtually no business discussed." Virtually.

He does not speculate on what, if any, impact such fine fellowship while massacring mallards might have on the future of electronic publishing.

The effect could well be zero. Dingell and Brooks are serious men, not about to save the publishers from the Baby Bells just because the ANPA’s top lobbyist is a mainstay of the Democratic money machine. And both chairmen play this game to win. They don’t go out on limbs to do people favors.

Indeed, when it comes to anteing up for a prime seat at the public policy poker table, the ANPA is a piker. It doesn’t even have a PAC, a fact often alluded to by lobbyists on the electronic publishing issue as an obvious handicap. "The best thing they have going for them," says a lobbyist allied with the publishers but unimpressed with their political acumen, "is, they buy their ink by the barrel."

The PACs of the seven Bells and their subsidiaries, by comparison, have spent over $8 million on campaign contributions and other political activities in the five years from 1987 through 1991, according to the Almanac of Federal PACs and FEC records. While only fragmentary numbers are available for 1992, it’s almost certain the Bells will give more during the current lobbying battle than in any prior year. Another generous source of campaign money is the union representing Bell blue-collar workers, the Communications Workers of America, whose PAC has spent more than $5 million since 1987.

And Dingell and Brooks have both gotten far more money from the Bells’ PACs-$56,380 for Dingell and $26,500 for Brooks since 1987-than they have from Tommy Boggs and all of the nation’s newspapers combined.

All this is much appreciated by the recipients. So are the individual gifts to politicians by top Baby Bell executives since their companies were born in 1984, out of the 1982 consent decree that spun them and their local telephone monopolies off from the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Inc.

On a snowy day in 1992, Boggs sits in his office with a cigar explaining to a reporter that "helping members of Congress raise funds is a very important part of operating in Washington."

Why? "Because," he says softly and deliberately, "it’s an incredible burden on them to have to raise as much money as they have to raise to get reelected, and anyone who can help them save some time is important to them."

The conventional wisdom is that the kind of systematic campaign contributing done by Washington lobbyists like Boggs and by industries like the Bells gets them "access" to policymakers, not necessarily votes. It buys them seats at the table, not winning hands.

"There is also a hope of some PACs that they can get the best cards in the deck," says one congressman. "That’s why they don’t spend any money on challengers and they give money almost exclusively to incumbent members of the committees with jurisdiction over their issues. They won’t waste money on people who can’t help them."

THE CABLE CONNECTION: A STRATEGIC PUNT

The Bells got access to John Dingell the last week in February, when he received a small delegation headed by William Weiss, chairman and CEO of Ameritech Corporation, the Chicago-based Bell whose wires crisscross Dingell’s home state of Michigan, and whose PAC always remembers him at election time.

Ameritech’s private visit to Dingell’s office was prompted in part by a very public Judiciary Committee hearing the week before, on February 19, at which the Bells took a pasting from chairman Jack Brooks.

A Texas populist and longtime critic of the telephone monopolies, Brooks had threatened the Bells with tight antitrust curbs and had ridden hard on Ivan Seidenberg, the NYNEX Corporation vice-chairman who testified for the Bells.

Between puffs on his cigar, Brooks had suggested he might seek to overturn key aspects of a series of judicial rulings that freed the Bells to enter the potentially enormous field of electronic publishing last October, with no new safeguards against using their local phone monopolies to strangle competitors.

Brooks had also pressed the ANPA, AT&T, MCI Communications Corporation, the $20 billion cable industry, the Consumer Federation of America, and others in the broad anti-Bell coalition that had been galvanized by the court rulings to band together to counteract the Bells’ lobbying muscle, and to bury past squabbles.

With the newspapers and many electronic information service providers "on death row," as a House staffer puts it a tad hyperbolically, publishers and their allies and lobbyists have been swarming Capitol Hill in waves clamoring for Congress to save them from Bell competition and monopolization. The anti-Bell coalition’s "Unity Statement" now includes more than 1,000 companies and consumer groups all over America as signatories.

The Bells are swarming the Hill with equal intensity. Their opinion of Brooks slipped out-too baldly for their own good, some astonished House staffers say-when Ameritech’s top lobbyist, John Connarn, bashed Brooks in March in an interview with The Washington Post for "doing the bidding of our adversaries," and said that Brooks’s February 19 hearing "gave a good name to kangaroo courts."

Not very diplomatic. Might this suggest that Brooks should expect less in Bell PAC donations in the future? Time will tell.

While the Bells now see Brooks as their most potent antagonist, they look to his old and dear friend and hunting companion Dingell as their first line of defense. Unlike Brooks, Dingell has long seemed sympathetic (although not clearly committed) to the Bells’ efforts to break the AT&T consent decree’s ban on Bell entry into the manufacturing, electronic publishing, and long distance markets.

And if Brooks’s hearing was a kangaroo court, then the 6-foot-3-inch, 220-pound Dingell’s audience with Ameritech’s Weiss and Connarn on February 26 was more akin to a king receiving his vassals, suggesting how they might comport themselves if they wished his grace to shine on them.

They were accompanied by Morton Barr, a top official of the Communications Workers of America, the union for most of the Bells’ blue-collar employees. Also present was David Leach, Dingell’s top telecommunications adviser.

The Ameritech officials asked Dingell, according to one source who was there and three others who weren’t, what action he foresaw this year on their three big issues: electronic publishing; a Senate-passed bill to erase the AT&T consent decree’s ban on phone manufacturing by the Bells; and the push by some of the Bells and other phone companies for so-called "cable-telco" legislation lifting the statutory ban on phone companies’ entering the cable business.

Dingell’s advice was clear: He didn’t expect the ANPA-backed proposals for restricting the Bells in electronic publishing to get far this year. But trouble on that front could arise if the phone companies were to persist in their efforts to hitch their cable-telco proposals onto the famously proconsumer bill to reregulate soaring cable television rates.

The cable rereg bill, which the Senate passed by 73 to 18 in January, is the most powerful locomotive to come along in years in the telecommunications field. Everyone from the ANPA to the broadcasters to the Bells would like to hitch a ride on it for their own pet proposals.

But Dingell wants to keep that bill clean and uncomplicated, House aides say. He and his fellow Democrats would love to pass it by a veto-proof margin, plunk it on President Bush’s desk just before the November elections, and dare him to brook the wrath of cable consumers by vetoing it.

"Dingell thought there was a lot of baggage on that bill already," says a person who was at this meeting with Ameritech. This source recalls Dingell saying that "if [the Bells] were to make efforts to get [cable-telco] legislation on there, that that vehicle would be opened up to other amendments regarding the telephone industry."

Like, for example, the ANPA-backed proposals to kick the Bells out of electronic publishing.

"He didn’t tell us what to do," a Bell official said after the Dingell-Weiss meeting, "but I didn’t just get off the bus yesterday."

Dingell, always a domineering presence, was telling the Bells what not to do if they value their now-unfettered access to the electronic publishing market.

The immediate result was to kill in its cradle a February 14 policy decision by the U.S. Telephone Association- which includes the seven Bells, the gigantic GTE Corporation, and many smaller phone companies-to hitch their cable-telco proposals to the rereg bill.

The Bells decided on a strategic punt for 1992 at a meeting of Bell CEOs on the day after the Ameritech-Dingell meeting, according to a Bell official. The CEOs were in Washington on other business.

"The deciding factor at the CEO meeting on the cable issue was Bill Weiss’s report on the Dingell meeting," the official says. "The perception was that Dingell had issued a warning. I don’t think he was saying, ‘If you do this, I will get you.’ It was more along the lines of, ‘Here are some things that might happen that you should consider.’ "

So the Bells will pursue cable-telco some other year. For 1992 they will play a defensive game. They won’t push Congress to do nice things for them, the better to stop Congress from doing bad things to them.

Dingell and Brooks, who is sponsoring a bill that would have to get past Dingell’s committee, might seem to be on a collision course. But these two masters of the game don’t like to collide. Some lobbyists suspect they may already privately have worked out some kind of compromise.

More likely, says an aide to one of them, Dingell and Brooks "will let the staffs slug it out for a while and then they’ll work something out before it gets too messy. There’s no rules. It’s all ad hoc, personalities, broken-field running, not like litigation at all."

And even powerful, old-fashioned chairmen like Brooks and Dingell don’t make policy in a vacuum. They float and weigh options. They prod opposing armies of lobbyists to present Congress with something digestible by building coalitions. They wait for the adversaries to test each other’s strength, fight preliminary skirmishes, and start making deals.

"The question is, who’s going to jump in bed with whom?" says a House staffer. "At some point the publishers and their allies may find it’s time to sit down and make some deals with the [Bells] before they get completely blown away by the courts. Congress can’t always bring people to the table. But if people are sitting at the table and John Dingell and Jack Brooks happen to walk through the door and see them, they say, ‘Well, what have we got here?’ "

At this writing, however, the newspapers are so far behind that they could hope for little more than a negotiated surrender if they were to seek a deal with the Bells. They are still trying to show enough momentum to get into the game.

BABY BELL BEHEMOTHS

The newspapers’ biggest problem is the sheer muscle of "the financially mighty and politically influential regional companies-in many areas the most powerful private entities extant," in the words of Harold Greene. He is the monopoly-busting U.S. district judge in Washington who has supervised the AT&T consent decree since 1982.

The seven Bells have $80 billion a year in revenues, compared with the newspapers’ $33 billion. They have $160 billion in assets. They had $8.2 billion in 1992 profits, more than any single U.S. company. And their profits are more or less guaranteed by their regulated monopoly status.

In contrast with the newspapers, the Bells are highly efficient at mobilizing their 500,000 employees to lobby legislators by phone, mail, and face-to-face-in shopping malls, bars, bowling alleys, chamber of commerce meetings, country clubs, and hospitality suites where executives hobnob at ratepayers’ expense.

Top Bell brass not only urge employees to contact congressional offices, they give them scripts of what to say [see sidebar].

"They have people at all levels… who are assigned to be the close contacts of public officials-mayors, county executives, state delegates, congressmen, governors, White House officials, you name it," says Representative Jim Cooper (D-Tennessee), a leading advocate of clamping restraints on the Bells. "Sometimes it’s a golf buddy, sometimes it’s a tennis buddy or a poker buddy or a drinking buddy, sometimes it’s a family friend."

"They have tentacles into every Rotary club, every school, every handicapped rights group, every bank board in the country," says a lobbyist at a company which, like many, has multimillion-dollar business ties to the Bells but fears their monopolistic potential. "When they get together, I can’t imagine any force in this country that could overcome that kind of power and money."

This lobbyist wants anonymity because the Bells are a big customer, and "we don’t want to piss them off."

Cathleen Black of the ANPA and other adversaries claim that the Bells are spending more than $20 million a year on grass-roots lobbying alone to block legislation on electronic publishing and to lift other consent decree restrictions.

Such figures began circulating when a 1990 article in Communications Week quoted Bell sources as saying the seven had agreed to kick in $3 million each, aside from their usual lobbying expenses, for advertising and grass-roots efforts. Bell lobbyists say they are spending far less. They won’t say how much.

In any event, it is clear that they are spending several times as much as the ANPA, which, according to Black, has given lobbyists and consultants about $1.2 million to fight the Bells and paid another $700,000 for advertising and public relations.

And while the newspapers have signed up two of the biggest names in the Washington lobbying game- Boggs and Richard Wiley of Wiley, Rein & Fielding, the former Federal Communications Commission chairman and Republican heavyweight who has been the ANPA’s lead litigator for over a decade-the Bells have a far larger and more potent army.

"You go to any congressional fund raiser and you’ll find seven of these guys," Wiley said in a televised debate with Ronald Stowe, head of the Washington office of Pacific Telesis Group, a Baby Bell.

Indeed, one result of splitting Ma Bell seems to have been to triple or perhaps even quintuple the local phone monopolies’ in-house Washington lobbying force. The 1991 issue of Washington Representatives lists some 70 professionals in the seven Bells’ Washington offices, with the 20-person Bell South office boasting as many as did all of AT&T before the breakup.

The top Bell lobbyists in Washington present a united front, meeting weekly to strategize, with Stowe acting as chairman this year.

Regular attendees include Thomas Tauke, the savvy former Republican congressman from Iowa who championed pro-Bell legislation when he was in the House, lost a 1990 Senate race, and now heads the NYNEX Washington office; Raymond McGuire of BellSouth, the dean of the group; Ameritech’s Connarn; and representatives of Bell Atlantic, Southwestern Bell, and U S West. (Among Tauke’s NYNEX subordinates is Barbara Morris-Lent, wife of Congressman Norman Lent of New York, the Dingell committee’s ranking Republican.)

Complementing the Bells’ in-housers are squadrons of outside lobbyists who have passed through the revolving door as congressional staff or executive branch officials, among them: Bernard Wunder of the Washington law firm of Wunder, Diefenderfer, Ryan, Cannon & Thelen, who, as the Reagan Commerce Department’s top telecommunications official, opposed the breakup of AT&T; Ralph Everett of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, former chief counsel to Senate Commerce chairman Ernest Hollings, the South Carolina Democrat who last year rammed through the Senate the bill that would let the Bells into phone manufacturing; and Thomas Ryan, a former chief counsel for Dingell, who is now at the Wunder firm.

The Bells’ stable also includes Laurence Tribe, the peripatetic professor-litigator-expert witness from Harvard Law School. He had top billing among the 26 lawyers listed on a September 1989 D.C. Circuit brief in which the seven Bells argued that barring them from electronic publishing violated the First Amendment. (The court did not reach the merits of that issue.) Tribe has been their lead litigator since that brief, taking over from Floyd Abrams of New York’s Cahill Gordon & Rein-del, who promptly disappeared after a short stint in the Bell lineup.

(Abrams explains that one of his media clients-whom he can’t name-asked him as a "personal favor" to stop representing the Bells, after his appearance as lead counsel on their original D.C. Circuit brief in 1989 had caused a "significant stir at an ANPA meeting when it was announced that I had written the brief." Abrams, who has represented American Lawyer Media, L.P., stresses that he had cleared the representation in advance with all his media clients and that there had never been "the slightest suggestion there was a conflict of interest.")

Tribe’s work has included extensive involvement in the litigation, congressional testimony as an expert witness (for which he says he did not bill the Bells), and preparing a 27-page First Amendment/Separation of Powers/ "Bill of Attainder" brief attacking anti-Bell bills, which was sent to all 535 members of Congress. According to a lawyer in a position to know, Tribe has taken in at least $500,000- $1 million in Bell money over the past three years, mostly in 1991 when he was on a sabbatical from teaching. Tribe declines to comment on his fees.

Still, those fees are no doubt dwarfed by the millions earned over the years by Chicago’s Mayer, Brown & Platt, the Bells’ main litigation counsel.

WINING AND DINING

But big-brained professors who churn out arguments on the merits, well-connected veterans of the regulatory agencies and congressional staffs, and millions in campaign contributions are only the tip of the Bells’ lobbying iceberg.

Like others that work Congress on a continuing basis, the Bells also do their best to win friends and influence people the old-fashioned way, by wining and dining them.

A glimpse into this process is provided by BellSouth records that Tennessee regulators obtained in a 1990 investigation aimed at preventing the company from sticking ratepayers with lobbying expenses.

The records, which the company sought to shield as "confidential commercial information," include $107,580 in expenses attributed to the 1988 "Republican & Democratic National Convention," such as for hospitality suites in hotels, and $3,030 for "Demo. Hotel Room to be used by Rep. Rostenkowski (Rite Carlton)"; $9,507 for catering and liquid refreshments for a congressional Softball tournament; $6,000 for "tickets for presidential inauguration banquet"; $3,750 for "30 tickets to take congressmen, etc., to Taste-of-the-South"; $2,000 each for "professional services" (presumably speech honoraria) paid to four senators and six representatives; another $1,500 to Representative Lent for a breakfast meeting; and $6,000 to sponsor tables for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.

In addition, the Bells have conducted a massive advertising campaign including a mix of bare-knuckled attacks on opponents and visions of the wondrous array of services that will come rushing through the phone lines.

Those who have felt the Bells’ wrath most directly include Congressman Jim Cooper and cosponsors of his ANPA-backed bill. It would impose strict safeguards against monopolistic abuse and an "entry test" barring each Bell company from electronic publishing in its own region (and only there) as long as it has a local phone monopoly. Senator Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) is sponsoring a somewhat similar bill.

Cooper’s proposal would let the Bells do much more than they could before the courts "gave them the keys to the candy store," as he puts it. But the Bells hit him and his bill’s early cosponsors hard last fall with sharp radio and print ads in their home districts, accusing them of trying to deny constituents "the right to receive a sweeping array of information services."

"Their congressional strategy has been to attack anyone who dares to co-sponsor my bill," Cooper says. "The net effect is about a one hundred fifty thousand-dollar penalty"-his estimate of what the Bells spent on attack ads in some districts. (A BellSouth spokesman says that figure is a gross exaggeration.)

Other targets of the ads accused the Bells of "a blatant attempt at intimidation" and "the tactics of the gutter," in the words of Representative Tom Lantos, a California Democrat whom Pacific Telesis attacked in radio ads in his district.

Newspaper lobbyists claim the ads backfired by exposing the Bells as bullies. But a Bell lobbyist responds that the ads did their job: scaring prospective cosponsors away from Cooper’s bill by serving notice that "we’re in this thing dead serious, and it is not a free ride…. There is a price to be paid. We understand the down side. This is hardball stuff."

The ANPA-backed Cooper bill is now all but dead in its original form. But its sponsor, a 1980 Harvard law graduate and former Rhodes Scholar from rural Tennessee whose father was governor of the state, says it was only an opening shot. He vows to fight on.

THE NEWSPAPER LOBBY: NEW TO THE GAME

The ANPA lobbying effort has been "bush league" compared with that of the Bells, in the words of a lawyer allied with the newspapers-at least until Tommy Boggs was brought in last October.

The publishers used to look down their noses at the kind of access-peddling practiced by the likes of Boggs. The glad-handing, mud-wrestling, horse-trading, and favor-seeking of the legislative arena have not traditionally been the ANPA’s style. "They’ve always been holier than thou," says a House staffer who shares the publishers’ fears of Bell monopolization. "They irritated everybody in town by not returning their phone calls," says a lobbyist who is now allied with them.

While the ANPA has long had a small in-house lobbying apparatus, headed by W. Terry Maguire, the reflective, recently departed senior vice-president and general counsel, they and he have never been part of the Capitol gang.

Most publishers still shrink from buying friends with campaign contributions, although such squeamishness is diminishing with the emergence of multimedia empires like Cox Enterprises. The newspapers usually haven’t needed that much from Congress. And the ANPA has usually been able to get what it did need by getting individual publishers to lobby members in their home districts.

Until last summer the publishers had counted on Judge Greene’s enforcement of the consent decree to protect them from the phone companies. But last year’s court rulings easing the restrictions on information services made it clear that Olympian detachment from the lobbying game was a luxury the publishers could afford no longer.

Their industry was already in unprecedented distress and long-term decline. Now they faced what the ANPA’s Black calls "the fight of our lives."

"They know," says a House staffer, "that there’s some beast inside the cave that could well eat them."

The courts opened the cave door at a time of disarray at the ANPA. Black had arrived last May as president and CEO, and by early this year, Maguire had left, as had the two women who ran his lobbying staff.

A former publisher of Gannett’s USA Today, Black was brought in to raise the ANPA’s profile, at what an ANPA official confirms is an annual salary and bonus of roughly $750,000, compared with her predecessor’s $297,000.

An engaging, forceful 48-year-old doer, Black started behind the eight ball. She knew little about journalism, less about politics and government, and almost nothing about the complex telecommunications issues that are now the ANPA’s biggest problem.

Opinions differ as to how well Black has risen to the challenge.

"She’s like a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback in her first pro game, thrown in in the fourth quarter, three touchdowns behind, against a team renowned for its blitz," says Gene Kim-melman, legislative director for the Consumer Federation of America.

But critics say that for one with so much to learn, Black has been more interested in showing she is boss than in listening to those who know the issues and the political realities.

"I think she got the job because she had a tremendous amount of presence and appeal," says one critic. "She’d be an extremely successful actress or television anchor. Neither requires much depth of understa understanding."

When Black put in a brief appearance to speak to a meeting of lobbyists for other anti-Bell interests in December, according to one lobbyist who was there, "it was supposed to be conciliatory and all that, but it came across like Lady Di visiting a nursing home." Another lobbyist says that Black’s remarks at the meeting were "almost arrogant."

"She was playing a very tough solo performance-‘We don’t need you; you may need us,’" says another lawyer who was there.

Nor did Black hit it off with Terry Maguire, who had been among those seeking the job she got. Black made it clear she would be running the lobbying show directly. Maguire chafed at having the plays called by a rookie without a playbook. He finally left in February, for Washington’s ABRH Consulting, Inc., which does work for the Bells. Black’s send-off was frosty: a public statement that she expected Maguire to live up to [his] pledge" not to do Bell work this year.

Even if Maguire had had no problems with Black, he was also out of sync with the mind-sets of many publishers.

He sees the coming marriage of information and telephone technology as a wave that newspapers must catch and ride into the future. But despite sanguine ANPA rhetoric about newspapers’ strides in electronic publishing, many have done very little, and would just as soon delay not only Bell entry but the electronic information age itself. Why speed the obsolescence of all that newspaper plant equipment?

Indeed, the publishers have been bashed as "modern-day Luddites" by one of their own: Allen Neuharth, former ANPA chairman, former Gannett chairman, and former Cathleen Black boss. In a March 18 speech at a conference sponsored by George Washington University, he accused ANPA leaders of subverting free press principles by seeking curbs on the Bells’ rights to do electronic publishing. "Can you imagine the gall of the newspaper owners or publishers screaming ‘monopoly’ at anyone else?" Neuharth asserted.

The Bells have run their fax machines overtime to get Neuharth’s speech around. While few journalists take him very seriously as an authority either on journalism or on the First Amendment, "it shows a break in the ranks," as an anti-Bell lobbyist ruefully observes.

For all these reasons, the ANPA was way behind the game last October when it hired Boggs to head up its team of outside lobbyists. "They needed someone who was very well connected with the House and the House leadership," says a source close to the lobbying effort.

Nobody fits that blueprint better than Thomas Hale Boggs, Jr. His father was House majority leader before his death in a 1972 plane crash. Then his mother, Lindy, took over the family seat from Louisiana, serving alongside Brooks and Dingell for almost two decades before retiring in 1990.

Black and others close to the ANPA effort say Boggs has more than earned his $440 an hour, and many congressional aides say he’s a bargain at the price.

"Tommy Boggs understands how to pitch a message to members, and he understands the message they pitch back," says an aide to a House chairman. Another ANPA lobbyist says Boggs has been "very good at keeping a pretty big train moving forward in the right direction."

But according to a congressional insider who wants to restrain the Bells, in this battle Boggs "is probably a liability, in the sense that he is such a visible Washington insider that the other side can point to him as an ANPA muscle man"-when the reality is that the Bells have "bought all of Washington."

The rest of the ANPA lobbying team has included Wiley, the former FCC chairman who not only litigates but lobbies Republicans in Congress and the administration with others in his law firm while Boggs and his partner Ira Fishman work the Democrats; Susan Buck of Bond Donatelli, Inc., who picked up the slack when Richard Bond became Republican national chairman in January and had to stop lobbying his friends in the Bush administration; Anne Wexler and Toby Moffett, the former Democratic congressman from Connecticut, both of The Wexler Group; Howard Symons, a former House telecommunications subcommittee counsel, and Charles Ferris, another former FCC chairman, both of the Washington office of Boston’s Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo; and John Buchanan, a liberal former Republican congressman from Alabama, former Senate aide John Podesta, and former ANPA in-house lobbyist Claudia James, all of Podesta Associates, Inc.

This is an impressive, seasoned platoon. But if it has a winning strategy for driving the Bell regiments down from their commanding redoubts atop Capitol Hill, it has remained a mystery to ANPA allies and adversaries alike.

"It’s one thing to get a lot of churn going," says an anti-Bell lobbyist, "you know, publishers hitting up members of Congress. And it’s another thing getting balls through hoops."

The publishers do have one potentially enormous edge, especially in an election year: their powers to help or hurt legislators’ political fortunes and public opinion through news reports, editorials (especially election endorsements), and advertising.

"The members generally don’t want to do anything to the newspapers," says a Bell lobbyist, "because that’s the one special interest that’s able to tell them to jam it, that sort of has the drop on them. These people are afraid of the newspapers."

"I’ll give you our entire PAC budget if you’ll just give me control over their editorial pages," says another Bell lobbyist, Stowe of Pacific Telesis.

Almost all editorials on electronic publishing have supported the publishers. But such issue-oriented editorials have little effect on elections.

Newspaper attacks on legislators by name and pre-election endorsements can have a big effect. But only publishers without journalistic integrity would exploit their power to the fullest by supporting or opposing a member’s reelection based on this one issue.

While big papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post are unlikely to do this, and Black and Boggs say they would never encourage such conduct, a congressional aide says that "things are a Tot faster and a lot looser" on many smaller newspapers. "Some members have been roughed up pretty ugly by publishers," he adds. "And some by telephone companies."

Bell lobbyists claim that some newspapers have heavy-handedly warned their congressmen to get busy saving them from the Bells or face punishment in print.

"They have put tremendous heat on," Stowe says, "and the heat is increasing because they know that time is not on their side…. Members are feeling more vulnerable as election time comes closer, and the publishers know that, and are making more and more use of it."

Stowe says a few congressmen have told him confidentially that newspapers in their districts have threatened to oppose them for reelection or even to disregard their press releases unless they come through.

Representative Michael Oxley (R-Ohio) confirms news reports that he believes The Blade of Toledo was seeking to punish him when it ran an article and an editorial blasting his acceptance of free trips from special interests. The pieces ran shortly after he had spurned entreaties to support anti-Bell legislation from the president of the cable unit of Blade Communications, Inc., which also owns the newspaper. The Blade has denied any connection.

Another Bell lobbyist adds that while overtly "malicious" conduct is unusual, "the unspoken pressure is certainly there" whenever a publisher asks an elected official for help.

Nor is the ANPA above rallying popular support by using scare tactics such as its campaign to persuade the public that the Bells will invade everyone’s privacy if allowed in information services. In one form letter, Cathleen Black foretells what might happen if you were to call a marriage counselor: "Tipped off by information purchased from the phone company, a divorce lawyer shows up on your doorstep the next morning."

Whatever the publishers’ ethics, they seem to overestimate their influence, some lobbyists claim. As of early April, they say, the publishers seemed still not to grasp what had been obvious to others for months: that they were betting on a dead horse in the Cooper bill to bar the Bells indefinitely from electronic publishing in their own regions. The best attainable bill would probably be a short freeze on Bell entry into electronic publishing and a package of tough regulatory safeguards against monopolistic abuses, such as separate, walled-off electronic publishing subsidiaries. If the newspapers really mean it when they say they will settle for no less than the Cooper bill, one House staffer says, "they are in dreamland."

THE NO NAMES: COALITION OR COMPETITION?

The bottom line, most lobbyists agree, is that by themselves the newspapers and other existing competitors in the still-embryonic electronic publishing field have no chance of pushing a bill of any kind through Congress over Bell opposition.

"If it was only the Bells and the newspapers," says Brian Moir, an anti-Bell lobbyist with D.C. s Fisher, Way-land, Cooper and Leader, "it wouldn’t be much of a fight."

So Bell opponents are trying to revive a coalition of hundreds of businesses and consumer groups to push the kind of proposal Jack Brooks has made: kicking the Bells out of information services and keeping them out of manufacturing and long distance for a specified "cooling-off" period, after which they could seek to show the Justice Department and courts their entry would not harm competition. Brooks also proposes competitive safeguards against Bell domination of those markets.

Such a coalition has, in fact, existed for years. It has called itself the No Name Coalition, a reflection of its difficulty finding consensus on anything. It was born, according to Moir, its chairman, on the first Friday in June 1985, when then-Senate majority leader Robert Dole announced an administration-backed proposal to shift supervision of the consent decree from Judge Greene to the pro-Bell FCC-a formula for gutting the restrictions.

Telephones buzzed all over town. "By the end of that Friday," Moir recalls, "the seeds of the largest coalition in the history of the telecommunications industry had been planted."

It is a formidable array of large and small companies and consumer groups. Coalition meetings have drawn just about every business that fears Baby Bell competition and monopolization: long distance carriers and telecommunications manufacturers, including AT&T, MCI, GTE Sprint, Tandy Corporation, and a host of smaller companies; newspaper groups and other information companies including the ANPA, the National Newspaper Association (which represents more than 5,000 small newspapers), and the owners of electronic publishers like Prodigy Services Company (an IBM-Sears joint venture), CompuServe, LEXIS/NEXIS, Westlaw, The Dun & Bradstreet Corporation, McGraw-Hill, Inc., and American Express Company; the security alarm and data-processing lobbies; and other electronic publishers and providers of enhanced phone services like voice mail.

Small businesses like security alarm companies that depend on the phone network to report alarms are especially desperate, one No Name lobbyist says: "Unless there’s a bill this year, those little companies are going to die."

Also in the coalition are representatives of consumer, ratepayer, and public interest groups concerned that the Bells would jack up local telephone rates to cross-subsidize information services and other ventures that most ratepayers don’t want or need. These include Brian Moir’s client, the International Communications Association, a group of 700 large companies and other organizations that pay an aggregate of $23 billion a year in phone bills; almost all state utility consumer advocates; Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, which was founded by Ralph Nader; the Media Access Project; and the Consumer Federation.

"When members of Congress begin to realize that this is seven companies versus America," says Moir, "that’s when this thing moves like a hot knife through butter."

But history has shown the difficulty of holding together a group with such diverse interests, with many members wary of offending the Bells because they are important customers or prospective joint venture partners. The coalition has tended to fly apart when push comes to shove.

"The stake in the heart of the esprit de corps of the group," says a lawyer who attends No Name meetings, was against the Bells."

AT&T’s high-level decision in 1987 to tell Judge Greene (and later, with far greater effect, the D.C. Circuit) that electronic information services "so far [are] not being provided" by the newspapers and others, and that AT&T wouldn’t mind if the courts let the Bells do it.

Many anti-Bell litigators and lobbyists were furious, among them Brian Moir. He says that he and lobbyists for the Consumer Federation and the ANPA had each urged AT&T at the highest levels that such a supposedly "neutral" stance would both wreck the anti-Bell coalition and unravel the decree by leaving the information services restriction undefended by any of the original parties. Another No Name regular, noting AT&T’s apparent goal of avoiding friction with its biggest customers, says, "AT&T set the tone of people selling out, people not having trust, and letting down each other against the Bells."

While the No Name Coalition has not always been the happiest of families, Moir says that now "those wounds have largely healed," and it has become more cohesive. A key congressional aide agrees. "They’ve really got it together now," he asserts. And another lobbyist who has often been disappointed by No Name fractiousness says that at a meeting in March, "there was a real team spirit. People seemed ready to roll. Brooks has lit a fire under what’s left of any hope."

We’ll see. A Bell lobbyist says that "my own guess is, if the newspapers could strike a deal with us, they would jettison AT&T." He adds that individual publishers are already jumping into joint ventures with Bells-in effect betting that the ANPA will lose.

LINING UP THE PUBLIC INTEREST GROUPS

Confronted with the opposition of traditional consumer advocates, the Bells have enlisted an impressive-seeming array of public interest groups to sign on (some rather ambiguously) in support of their electronic publishing aspirations. They include the NAACP, the National School Boards Association, the American Council of the Blind, the National Association of the Deaf, the World Institute on Disability, an outfit called the National Council of Silver Haired Legislators, and many more.

But most consumer groups that have been active in telecommunications policy oppose the Bells, and say the Bells have far less real "consumer" support than meets the eye. The newspapers’ credibility is enhanced by their alliance with the Consumer Federation, which has 240 member groups and a legislative director-Gene Kimmelman-who is well respected in Congress. He, like Judge Greene, argues that Bell entry into information services will hurt consumers, first by raising basic phone rates and later by reducing the diversity of services.

"As long as they remain a local monopoly," Kimmelman says, "we believe they should not be allowed to control and own the content of services that rely on their networks to reach the consumer, because they have a history of inflating their prices for local phone service to undercut competitors in other markets…. They are extremely adept at trying to make their losses appear as though they came on the regulated side, so then they have play money to use on the unregulated side."

Bell supporters dismiss Kimmelman as a Luddite. "He wants to be a player in this issue," says one, "and the way to be a player is to be out there throwing grenades."

The nonprofits that have lent the Bells their names say the benefits of receiving information through inexpensive, easy-to-use phones with computer-like capabilities would be especially liberating for disabled people with special needs, the elderly, students, and those who cannot afford the computers they would need to tap into the information services now available, like Prodigy.

Among the most active pro-Bell groups is the Alliance for Public Technology, which gets most of its money from the seven Bells and other phone companies. Critics dismiss it as a "corporate front group, set up by the Bell companies," in the words of a Nader-blessed publication called Masters of Deceit, written by Mark Megalli and Andy Friedman.

Nonsense, says Mary Gardiner Jones, a former Federal Trade Commission member who is president of the Alliance. "We’re not shills for anyone," she asserts, stressing the longstanding public interest credentials of several Alliance leaders. "We came together because we cared about making the markets available to consumers."

Kimmelman says that virtually all the groups aligned with the Bells either are fronts, or have been "bamboozled" by false promises, or are pursuing "parochial" agendas to finance costly services for those with special needs that could be met less expensively than by soaking ratepayers to goldplate the telephone network.

Congressman Jim Cooper adds that "many disabled people have been [falsely] convinced that their only hope for a better future is through the Bells, and I find that to be a cynical manipulation of the disabled community."

Not everybody in this fight is clearly aligned for or against the Bells. The American Civil Liberties Union, which is nobody’s front and nobody’s fool, takes very seriously the First Amendment arguments against barring the Bells from electronic publishing. But it supports stringent antimonopoly safeguards that the Bells say would deny them major efficiencies of integration.

A potentially influential public interest/computer industry coalition being organized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation is working at bringing big computer firms like International Business Machines, Apple Computer, Inc., Microsoft Corporation, and Sun Micro-systems, Inc., into this lobbying battle as tie-breakers. Headed by Lotus software developer Mitchell Kapor and Jerry Berman, formerly of the ACLU, the EFF is pushing a high-tech gospel aimed at enlisting the Bells to provide a digital highway for new electronic information services that the Bells could drive on themselves but not monopolize.

PROMISES, PROMISES

There is more to lobbying than campaign contributions, hospitality suites, access-peddling, and coalition-building. Sometimes a little policy analysis creeps in between the lines of the public relations offensives.

The Baby Bells have seized the rhetorical high ground as tribunes of the coming information age-the forces of innovation and competitiveness, fighting a special-interest effort to roll back the clock and keep America stuck in the technologies of the past.

The newspapers and their allies have to sell a proposition with less intuitive appeal: that the long-term risks of allowing these huge companies with proven monopolistic tendencies to dominate this new market outweigh any short-term benefits to consumers. Their ads chant the evils of monopoly like a leitmotif.

Examples of services the Bells say they will offer soon include devices such as remote pulse rate or blood pressure monitors to enable elderly or sick people to have vital signs checked via phone lines without leaving home; medical imaging to connect rural health centers with large urban hospitals; and online access by rural and inner-city students to remote electronic libraries and audiovisual databases.

"We’re looking at a different kind of market here, the average American consumer, not the highbrow professional who subscribes to services like Prodigy," says Stowe of Pacific Tele-sis. "Our business is mass market. We want to prime the pump."

But Judge Greene dismissed as "so much hype" and "preposterous" the Bells’ claims that the information services market needed the Bells to develop its full potential. Anti-Bell lobbyists add that the services they tout are already available to anybody who really wants or needs them. If the growth of a mass market for electronic information services to the home has been sluggish, they say, the reason is not inadequate supply but weak demand: Most people don’t care enough about newfangled services like online stock quotes, horoscopes, and classified ads to buy computers and modems.

The Bells, in turn, claim that the nation’s future competitiveness depends on their having unfettered access to the information services market. They reason that the United States needs to race Japan and other high-tech powers to deploy a "broadband" network of fiber optic wires, capable of bringing a virtually unlimited menu of data, information, and multichannel video (cable TV) options to every home. And the Bells say they need the big profits they hope to make in information services to give them the incentives to build this fiber optic infrastructure.

These arguments draw strong support from the Bush administration and the FCC, whose chairman, Alfred Sikes, told a Senate subcommittee in February that unless the Bells are unleashed to match Japan in the fiber optic race, future Americans will be doomed to "Third World-type communications."

Estimates of the costs of fibering America range above $400 billion. With the government running an annual deficit in that range, nobody in sight is likely to do it unless the Bells do.

But what’s the big rush to fiber America? ask dissenters like Jack Brooks, the Consumer Federation, and Kapor’s EFF.

The Bells are already using fiber optic wire extensively, as are some cable companies. The real questions are how fast existing networks of copper wires should be replaced, and whether ratepayers should pay when new fiber wires are strung down residential streets before the useful lives of the old wires have run out.

Virtually all information services conceived so far can be sent through plain copper telephone wires. And Kapor and Berman argue that Congress can bring a vast array of new information services to the home as early as 1994 without major new investments in rewiring. All that’s needed, they say, is to upgrade the central office switches to send voice, data, and video signals over the existing copper wires.

The Bells’ real agenda, according to critics, is to levy a huge, disguised tax on telephone ratepayers to finance extravagant efforts to take over first information services and then cable television, while prematurely depreciating the existing networks of copper wires.

"They are selling a panacea to the Congress that does not fit with market reality," the Consumer Federation’s Kimmehnan contends. "It’s a sham…. It’s a kind of a subsidy scheme for seven large corporations … to let the big boys control the economy …. You can’t get any smart investor on Wall Street to plunk down a few hundred billion dollars for that kind of iffy, speculative scenario, so they want to take it out of the good old telephone ratepayer, who is not a shareholder and doesn’t reap the benefit."

Anti-Bell experts stress that the Bells are driven by the profit incentives inherent in their very nature as rate-regulated natural monopolies to compete unfairly in unregulated adjacent markets like electronic publishing.

This is the lesson of the antitrust suits against AT&T that forced divestiture of the local phone monopolies. And anti-Bell lobbyists wave dossiers of alleged monopolistic abuses in recent years, documented by state public utility commission findings, as evidence that the Bells’ anticompetitive proclivities are as strong as ever.

The Consumer Federation claimed in a study last December that since the breakup the Bells had overcharged telephone ratepayers by more than $3 billion a year, using "the vast bulk of these overcharges … to create a huge array of unregulated affiliated companies," and to cross-subsidize them.

Anti-Bell lobbyists and legislators highlight a case in which a Boston Globe expose helped spur a 1990 finding by previously oblivious auditors for the understaffed FCC that NYNEX had overcharged its regulated local phone companies and their ratepayers by $118.5 million between 1984 and 1988 for supplies sold to them by an unregulated NYNEX purchasing subsidiary, Material Enterprises Co., which has since been dissolved. The FCC audit probed allegations that NYNEX executives, including William Ferguson, who is now its chairman and CEO, systematically pressured telephone subsidiary managers to buy from unregulated NYNEX vendors even when better deals could be had elsewhere. NYNEX settled the FCC case by refunding $35 5 million to interstate customers, reducing the phone companies’ inflated capital accounts by $32.6 million, and paying the government $1.4 million. It has a continuing dispute with New York regulators who seek another $35 million in refunds to local ratepayers.

NYNEX was also indicted for contempt by a federal grand jury in June 1990, for violating the consent decree’s then-intact information services ban. The case went to trial before Judge Greene on April 6.

The Bells contend that what their opponents call cross-subsidies are often just efficiencies of integration. "The ‘threat’ of cross-subsidies," asserts a statement in a packet of materials handed out to reporters by Pacific Telesis lobbyist Stowe, "is simply a ruse for protecting local newspapers" against Bell competition. Telephone companies have no predisposition toward competing unfairly, Stowe says.

The Bells say the real monopolists in the information field are the newspapers, which could use a dose of competition from the electronic yellow pages that the Bells plan to offer.

The newspapers haven’t done squat compared to what they could have" to develop new electronic information services, Stowe asserts, because they felt no competitive pressure as long as the courts kept the Bells out.

Stowe’s press packet includes a copy of a September 22, 1991, New York Times story headlined, "At Many Papers, Competition Is at Best an Illusion," reporting that only 12 cities in the United States have two or more separately owned, fully competitive dailies, and many newspapers are owned by conglomerates that also own cable networks and television and radio stations.

Newspaper lobbyists scoff at tales of their monopoly power. "The last time I looked," says Alexander Netchvolo-doff, vice-president of government affairs in the Washington office of Cox Enterprises, "information is coming into the house so many different ways that people can hardly budget their time."

Bell lobbyists say that’s not the point. Newspapers may not have monopolies of news, but they do dominate local print advertising, especially classifieds, and in many monopoly newspaper cities, advertising rates have soared.

With monopolists on both sides, does it make any difference who wins? Many newspaper reporters and editors have little sympathy for their own publishers in this fight, seeing them as interested only in profits.

Perhaps so, says Gene Kimmelman. But some monopolies are more dangerous than others.

"There is a unique problem," he says, "with telephone companies that would both own the passageway into the home and control the content-the company that owns the wire controlling all the information that can flow over it."

THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE

It would be logical for Congress to confront together all the related questions raised by the convergence of the telephone, information, and cable industries. What efficiencies could the Bells bring to electronic publishing and cable? Do they outweigh the monopolistic risks? Have the Bells shed the anticompetitive proclivities and the facility at evading regulatory safeguards that led to the AT&T breakup? Do the newspapers have such monopolies on local news and advertising that the benefits of injecting Bell competition would outweigh any risks of eventual Bell monopolization?

Would breaking down the statutory wall between the cable and phone monopolies lead to healthy competition, as the Bush administration argues, or to buyouts, mergers, and even larger monopolies? These, however, are not the questions most people in Congress are asking as they are besieged by lobbyists.

"We could find one gigantic, infernal bolus before us," John Dingell says of proposals to expand the pending cable reregulation bill into a broad review of telecommunications policy. "But not if I can help it."

As for the congressional rank and file, "they don’t want to deal with this," says an anti-Bell lobbyist. "They just put their arms over their heads…. They don’t want to incur the wrath of the [Bells], who just loom over them so often that they kind of wear the staff down, and they don’t want to incur the wrath of the newspapers in an election year."

This don’t-make-me-vote attitude suits the Bells fine. They hope to win almost all they want from the courts if they can just keep Congress from spoiling the fun.

The Justice Department has sought removal of the consent decree’s manufacturing restriction since 1987, and hardly seems wedded to the long distance restriction. In a pending case it has joined the Bells in urging the D.C. Circuit in essence to hold mat the courts must remove any restriction that the department wants removed.

A Bell lobbyist enthuses about the possibility that by 1995 or so, the remaining restrictions of the 1982 consent decree will have been shredded.

Then the Bells would come back to Congress for the icing on the cake: repeal of the 1984 statutory ban on phone companies’ entering the cable television business. After all, they would say, wouldn’t it be a waste not to use to the fullest the great new fiber network that we are building?

Aren’t you guys afraid of looking a bit greedy? the Bell lobbyist is asked.

"Wouldn’t you agree," he responds, "that wanting all those things is the American way?"

It seems a good bet that the Bells will get what they want, unless the newspapers and their allies can make some things happen fast in Congress.

On the wall of Thomas Hale Boggs, Jr. ‘s sumptuous inner office is a large frame containing some 50 pens-presidential signature pens from laws passed in the Great Society years. Lyndon Johnson had given them as a Christmas gift to Boggs’s father, then the House majority whip.

A visitor pauses to gape. Boggs shakes his head. "Fifty major laws enacted in nine months," he muses. "Can you imagine that happening in Congress today?"