Free speech at stake in FCC broadcast ruling

So what if the first and most far-reaching guarantee in the Bill
of Rights is a prohibition against government curtailment of free speech?

                  On
the airwaves starting 40 years ago, the Republicans discovered how to evade it
— even while they were aware, in addition to the Constitutional guarantee,
that federal law holds that the public owns the airwaves — and even though
the US Supreme Court had once ruled it Constitutional to regulate stations to
insure that public views were presented.

                  So
why has this supposedly Constitutionally-governed country been hurtling in the
opposite direction — allowing huge media conglomerates to systematically
choke off the public’s voice? Could the answer be a design on the part of
right-wing administrations to squelch popular views? Or is it happenstance
that, spurred by Republican administrations, the agency formed to implement the
public’s right to be heard, the Federal Communications Commission, is busily
chipping away at “guaranteed rights”?

                  Is it
happenstance that, starting during the Reagan Administration, the FCC has
issued patently unconstitutional rulings that concentrate station ownership and
effectively abridge those free speech and access rights that are supposed to be
sacrosanct?

                  To
understand how the public’s voice has been throttled since the broadcast
regulatory law (Federal Communications Act) was enacted in the 1920s, consider
the surprising but revealing words of that paragon of enlightenment Herbert
Hoover when he was secretary of commerce in the Coolidge Administration in the
1920s:

                  “It
(licensing radio) is a public concern impressed with the public trust and is to
be considered from the standpoint of the public interest.” Broadcast
licenses were not to be sold, but to be granted subject to performance in the
public interest.

So for over 50 years thereafter, not only were the broadcast media required by FCC regulation to
provide public access “on controversial issues of public importance,”
but they were also charged with serving the local community under a
lesser-known doctrine called “local ascertainment.”

                  “Local
ascertainment” meant that radio, and later radio and television stations,
were directed to offer opportunity for public views to be aired on major local
issues as well as to insure that those issues were ventilated on local stations
by the activists involved with them.

                  Moreover,
under the broader Fairness Doctrine, listeners and viewers were guaranteed the
right to respond when it came to “controversial issues of public
importance.” It was up to the station licensees to interpret the licensees’
responsibilities to air those views, but licensees who didn’t perform according
to regulation were subject to denial of relicensing.

                  It
was the Reagan Administration’s packing of the FCC that started the slide, that
regressive body ruling that cable transmission’s capability to enter any
community translated into unfettered public access. Previously, access had been
fettered by the sheer limitation of broadcast frequencies.

                  Therefore,
despite a stunning US Supreme Court ruling affirming it, the Fairness Doctrine
was invalidated when a Federal Appellate Court, implementing Reagan
Administration ideology, upheld the FCC’s rejection of the half-century-old
Doctrine. By then a conservative US Supreme Court refused to review the issue.

                  The
result has been to deny the public access to the airwaves it owns based on the
proliferation of cable transmission that, theoretically, provides a variety of
views and renders regulation obsolete.

A local example of
how the ascertainment regulation once worked to the public’s benefit occurred
in Rochester in the 1970s when radio station WHAM’s announcers, backed by the
station, refused to air issues that were deemed important to three local
constituencies: minorities, community activists, and organized labor.

                  The
three groups filed complaints, prompting the FCC to hold hearings. After three
days of testimony, the FCC granted WHAM a conditional re-license that was
subject to improved performance and conformed to the ascertainment doctrine.
Years later, when its performance improved, the station’s unconditional license
was restored.

                  Just
how severely Constitutionally-guaranteed free speech rights have been eroded
was demonstrated recently when the FCC paved the way, by a 3-2 vote, to more
and larger media consolidations into more and larger corporate structures. Over
the opposition of minority Democrats, Republican FCC commissioners voted to
allow increasingly huge conglomerates to own all, or nearly all, radio and
television stations in a given city or area.

                  The
effect can only be interpreted as a deliberate choking-off of public access and
to a restriction of that free speech we all believed was forever enshrined in
the Constitution.

                  (In 1963, Mitchell Kaidy
contributed articles with a team of reporters that won a special citation from
the Pulitzer Prize Committee for the Gannett Newspapers. In 1993, he won a
Project Censored award.)

This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2003.