FCC at Supreme Court: The Cultural Line of Forgetting
Some interest groups warn this deregulation could ruin TV the way deregulation ruined radio. What happened to radio?
Culturally, if you ask someone if radio is still alive and well, they might say yes, or no, I listen to Satellite radio now. Or they'll say the Internet made radio obsolete. But beyond the cultural line of forgetting lay several deregulations dating back to the early 1980s.
People born just early enough can imagine how different our expectations of Internet dialog civility would be today, had these terrestrial radio regulations stood:
-----------------------Line of Forgetting------------------------
(From a Santa Clara University document.)
2000: "the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down the FCC’s personal attack rule, which directed stations to notify and offer reply time to the targets of character attacks during discussions of controversial public issues on the air"
2000: the D.C. Court of Appeals also struck down " the Commission’s political editorializing rule, which required a licensee to offer response time to legally qualified political candidates when it opposed their candidacy or endorsed their opponent on air.3"
2000: FCC lengthened "stations' license terms from three to eight years,4"
1996: FCC completed "adoption of rules that make challenges to license renewals by the public or potential competitors almost impossible,5"
1987:"the Commission partially repealed the Fairness Doctrine, which had required stations to afford 'reasonable opportunity for the presentation of conflicting viewpoints on controversial issues of public importance.'"2
1981: "The FCC removed requirements that licensees formally ascertain their communities’ needs and provide appropriate news and public affairs, maintain production guidelines for news, and offer some minimum level of public affairs programming.1"
--------------------End Line of Forgetting-----------------------
In hindsight, GenXers can remember something changing in the 1980s, the late 1980s probably 1989. In our metropolitan area, "newstalk" radio station KGO was known nation wide has having one of the strongest broadcast signals. As such, they had reach and one imagines, budget. After a holiday break once, I remained tuned into KGO for all but the last miles of my drive from San Francisco to San Luis Obispo where I attended college. Through the 1990s, even through 2012, the station was a home for lively conversation and vollying listener calls. It was not time shifted.
KGO and other "newstalk" stations had diverse hosts (diverse as in some Republican, some Democrat). But as kids we weren't paying attention to the politics. We just listened to the rhythm and meter in which the talk DJs spoke. Then suddenly a handful of hosts, one I remember was named "Lee Rogers" had jumped to another station, maybe it was KSFO. But there was more to it than that. I remember my grandmother disapproving, and an "us vs. them" wedge had entered our culture. I forgot about it but the wedge advanced very gradually through the 1990s. My cursory memory knows someone named "Rush Limbaugh" gained name recognition, we lived through non-partisan Howard Stern and Dr. Drew before Stern fled to Satellite radio.
Back to today. The Supreme Court case is about television. We'll find out how the justices decided soon. One can hear their questioning at this C-Span link.
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
