A Federal Communications Commission employee called me on Friday and said that this Tuesday, the third anniversary of Kevin Martin's tenure as Chair of the FCC, at least some staff will arrive at work dressed in black. A "silent but expressive protest" is what they're calling the move. What for? I asked. "Because this place is hell," came the reply.

Some background: Last week Ars Technica published my story about how John Dingell's House Energy and Commerce Committee has demanded detailed FCC records related to over a dozen super-sensitive FCC issues and policies. We're talking e-mails, personnel records, letters of inquiry, meeting minutes, the works.

Shortly after the piece appeared that I got this e-mail: "In regard to Dingell's latest investigatory letter sent to the FCC March 12," it began, "just heard from some old colleagues at the FCC that they are all happily working on meeting the requests in this letter. And that the FCC staff are all going to be wearing black on Tuesday, March 18, as a sign of protest on the third anniversary of Martin being Chairman."

I was skeptical, and wrote back asking if this e-mailer could provide me with the name of at least one of these staffers. Soon I got a name and some contact info. I did some background work and requested an interview. The individual in question called two hours later. I asked some pretty detailed questions of this person, who requested anonymity. After our conversation, I came away convinced that this is on the level.

A super-politicized environment

It appears that a critical mass of FCC grunts are sick of what they experience as a super-politicized work life in which just about anything that they want to do has to get the go-ahead from the top, that being Kevin Martin. "Nothing happens in the Commission without the approval of the Chairman's office," my source told me. "It is incredible. We have become so political."

Do you have any sense of the logic of these directives from the Chair? I asked. "Nope," came the reply. "It seems as random as he got up this morning and ate his breakfast and just decided to do it."

Why are FCC employees upset about this? Not because they disagree with Kevin Martin's perspective on this or that FCC issue, but because, according to my source, he and his top subordinates demand that staff skip proper procedures and leapfrog various rules, even Congressional mandated rules, on a day-to-day level.

"In the past I may or may not have agreed with the outcome, but at least the proper procedures were followed. Now they tell us 'what are the media reform groups going to do: file a class action lawsuit? Just do it.' But ethically I have to sleep at night. It's not the decision, it's how the decision is reached. The situation has become arbitrary and capricious."

We talked about some specific examples. My source doesn't want them published for fear that agency top brass will trace this interview to them. But I've run into possible Kevin Martin-style micro-management in the past. Last summer I attended an FCC Consumer Advisory Council meeting on the DTV transition. Shortly afterwards I got a tip that the FCC had told members of the council not to talk to the press, but to route the query directly to the FCC. It came from a very credible person, so I called the Commission.

Someone called me back and said my source had got it all wrong. The directive was about helping the public with the logistics of filing comments with the FCC. "It wasn't in the context of having no discussions with the press," I was told. 'Yeah, right,' I thought at the time.

The most formidable whistle blower I've encountered is former FCC attorney and now law professor Adam Candeub. Two years ago Candeub straight out told the press that a report arguing that locally owned TV stations broadcast more local news "was stopped in its tracks because it was not the way the agency wanted to go." The study's conclusions obviously implied that retaining some of the FCC's media ownership caps might help those local TV stations survive.

When the FCC's Inspector General released a report exonerating the agency of meddling with the report, I interviewed Candeub, who called the audit "skewed." "Chairman Martin should be engaged in creating safeguards and processes to allow objective media research to flourish at the FCC," Candeub told me. "I worry that he's just too much of a partisan figure to be serious about such an endeavor." Now Congress wants the Commission to hand over all documents related to that audit in less than two weeks.

It's funny. Call me innocent and naive, but whenever I listen or watch Kevin Martin talk, he seems like a really nice guy. Soft-spoken, a little geeky and nervous, sometimes he speaks his words so quietly and fast that he stumbles over them. Compared to his sometimes swaggering predecessor Michael Powell, Martin comes off as self-effacing and modest.

But that's not how my dressed-in-black source sees him. "I am not a disgruntled employee," I was told. "I love my job. But this situation has become unbearable. We will not play this game. I have to sleep at night."