The FCC's Diversity Committee is about to take the wraps off a new initiative to help women and minorities raise the capital they need to become media owners.

Access to Capital, a conference to be held this summer in New York, will put venture capitalists and other financial institutions in the same room with female and minority entrepreneurs.

A venue and a date haven't yet been chosen, but Maria Brennan, president of American Women in Radio and Television, said the goal is to help break down the No. 1 barrier women and minorities face when trying to go from being managers to owners.

There are people with strong management backgrounds and great business plans who "hit a wall when they try to raise financing," Brennan said. "The Access to Capital conference is one way to address that."

The dismally low percentage of women and minorities who own TV and radio stations came up as soon as four members of the FCC sat down to speak to AWRT's annual Leadership Conference in Washington today.

Commissioner Deborah Tate pointed to the soon-to-be-announced Access to Capital conference as an example of how government and the private sector can partner to address problems like the lack of diversity in media.

While Tate said that such partnerships are preferable to adding new regulations, Commissioner Michael Copps emphatically disagreed, arguing that the FCC has done little to address the fact that women and minorities own only a tiny percentage of the full power TV stations in the United States.

"It's a national shame, and if we don't have a policy to address it, we are ill-serving the country," he said.

The FCC tinkered with its minority ownership rules in December, but because it failed to adequately define eligibility, white small businessmen will most likely take best advantage of the new rules, said Commissioner David Adelstein. "We didn't define eligible entities so that women and minorities would benefit," he complained.

Asked about the low percentage of women and minorities in senior management in the media, Adelstein said that the FCC should begin to track how many women and minorities are employed in radio and TV, so it will have a basis for deciding how to beef up Equal Employment Opportunity rules. The fact that women occupy only 11 percent of senior management jobs in radio and 15 percent of executive level positions in all media "is totally inadequate," Adelstein said. "EEO rules must be put in place so we get different viewpoints," he added. "If there were more women and minorities in management, you'd see a difference in the way the programming itself is conducted."

Commissioner Robert McDowell admitted that diversity is one area where the market has not served the public interest, but said the FCC's hands are often tied when trying to address the problem by fear that it will be overturned by the courts. "If it's considered too race conscious, the court will overturn it," he said.

Copps said the best way to address the lack of diversity is to reinstate the FCC's former approach to license renewal. Instead of having stations "send in a postcard every eight years," the FCC should require that stations renew their license every three years and report on the ways they are serving the public interest. "We'd have to update the guidelines," he said, and, alluding to the FCC's new rules requiring broadcasters to report their local programming efforts online, added: "with the Internet, we could do this."