Quote:
Originally posted by Rudey
Why does the government own the right to broadcasting? Why do stations have to pay the government for this right?
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Until recently stations have not had to pay for their use of the airwaves. That's pretty new. The simple reason is that the government needs more revenue and has decided that since it has "control" (not ownership), it can levy use fees. Kind of like public lands and National Parks, but on a bigger resource.
By U.S. law, "the public" owns the airwaves. Of course that's pretty hard to define.
So, while the government doesn't claim to "own" the airwaves, and thus broadcasting, it has controlled them since the original Communications Act of 1932 was passed in order to end the chaos that radio had brought about on itself. It has been rewritten a couple of times, the latest in about 1996 or so.
Prior to the Act, anyone could put a radio station on any frequency at any power with any programming that she/he wanted. What happened was a total disaster in which the entire broadcast bands ended up as interference, with hundreds of stations broadcasting on the same frequency.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was formed to govern the many on air services, including commercial radio broadcasting, land mobile (2 way communications), television, microwave, defense communications, fire and police services and many others.
It's been a while since my last broadcast history course, but initially, I believe, the FCC (originally the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) only had authority only over the technical piece of the pie. As time progressed, however, Congress has given the agency power over issues of Fairness (Section 315 which was roughly translated by most as "Equal Time," but really equal opportunity) in political and news programming. More recently the moved into other barely defined issues such as (in)decency and programming standards regarding things like smut, language, etc.
For years, the Commission took a hands off approach because of the worry of encroaching on the broadcasters First Amendment rights.
More politically conservative Administrations and Congresses have legislated more FCC involvement in the latter in recent years, though. This has been particularly true in the Bush Administration. On the other hand, programmers have been pushing content and testing decency standards at the same time.
As has happened in the past, the government only allows industry to push so far before it pushes back.
Does that explaination help at all?
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