Let’s say I have an unlimited supply of cash, and want to start my own national television station.
Also, let’s say that on my station, the only broadcast would be of someone talking about all that is wrong with the American government, how large and ineffective it has become, and that we should vote out all Democrat and Republicans in favor of a new party’s candidates. Do I have any hope of acquiring a license? More importantly, why hasn’t a case been brought up that challenges the FCC’s very existence?
Is the FCC the government’s way of preventing such opinions from being readily available to everyone in America, forcing the average citizen to rely on Fox News for it’s ‘fair and balanced’ reports?
Umm…the FCC only enforces RF spectrum usage and has nothing to do with content. As long as your station complies with FCC regulations regarding output power, frequency, bandwidth and the like, you can broadcast whatever content you wish, within limits. And those limits are enforced by another authority, not the FCC
I am not talking about directly limiting, I mean indirectly. If anyone with the cash can have their own TV station, why are the all owned by multi-national corporations who broadcast thinly disguised propaganda and anti-drug ads?
What limits, and who applies them? I was under the impression that all networks must petition for a license renewal from some government entity on a regular basis. I thought it was the FCC, but I guess not.
Many, many local television stations are independantly owned and not owned by giant multinational corporations. I think you’re thinking of television networks, which are owned by giant corporations because operating a television network is an extremely expensive endeavour. There are laws regarding how many affiliates may be directly owned by a network.
TV stations broadcast anti-drug ads because they are paid for like any other ads (but with your tax money, instead of a private corporation’s money.) They are a business, and they don’t care where the money comes from as long as the ad does not offend a great deal of people or other advertisers.
“Thinly disguised propaganda” is a matter of perception. Regardless, if they want to broadcast such propaganda, it’s not because anyone is making them do so.
Broadcasting licenses are indeed granted by the FCC. To get one you need to meet certain technical and business requirements, among other things.
Obscene content may be forbidded from being aired, but the standards for obscenity are a matter of law, not FCC regulation. If a TV station decides to get into the child porn business, it’s the FBI who is going to be knocking on their door. The FCC can revoke broadcast licenses, but only in response to a complaint, and only for a very extreme reason. As far as I know, the FCC has never revoked a television broadcast license.
Yes, stations must renew their licenses periodically, and the FCC does handle this. However, they do not grant or reject licenses based on programming content (or FOX would be out of business).
As far as coantent is conerned, TV and radio broadcast stations are largely self-censored. I believe there is a governemtal agency which oversees this process, but I’m not sure. All I know is, it isn’t the FCC.
No, you could not do what you describe – not precisely, anyway. At least, not if you want to do it with a broadcast station (or more properly, a series of broadcast stations).
For one thing, you couldn’t acquire enough television stations to reach everyone. Right now, a single entity such as you as a rich guy may control only enough television stations to reach 35 percent of the people with televisions (that limit is subject to change and is the source of much current controversy).
For another, whilst you can use your television stations reaching 35% of people to attack the government, if you attack specific candidates, including incumbents, you are required to offer them “equal time” to respond to whatever you’ve said about them – a reasonable opportunity for them to respond on “your” airwaves. You must also offer this opportunity to each qualified candidate for the office of the person whom you’ve attacked. So whilst you can say, “throw them all out,” if you say “throw Senator Soandso out” you have to let him and all other candidates for his office respond.
Additionally, broadcasters are responsible for serving local needs. The FCC won’t come down on you for this by yourself, your license can be attacked come renewal time by persons who are angry that you didn’t specifically attack their local governments (if you didn’t – I guess if you were on 24/7 you could manage it).
You can find more details about the barriers to your proposal (and perhaps refine it into one which would work) here.
Now if you wanted to do this with a cable station, many of your barriers would not apply; you’d just have to convince all the cable companies to carry the station.
Oh, and to answer your other question – the FCC doesn’t place much restriction on content (you could have an all-anarchy station, for example, as long as you advocated dismantling the government as opposed to supporting or opposing specific candidates for the government). The reason they do any content regulation at all is that there is a limited amount of broadcast frequency – you can’t just start another TV station the way you could start another newspaper or another website, and the State has taken it upon itself to do some regulation of this “public good.”
Thirty or so years ago, a television station in Boston was under heavy pressure by citizen and advocacy groups. One of the station executives met with an FCC officer. The station’s license was revoked NOT because of any programming violation, but because the meeting with the FCC official was judged to be improper contact.
As for the FCC’s very existence, you’ll have to go back to the first radio law of 1927, where control of the broadcast frquencies was given to the Federal government, because various unlicensed, unregulated broadcasters were interfering with each other, as well as with stations in other countries. The FCC’s founding in 1934 was an extension of the philosophy that government should regulate the broadcast spectrum, but not the programming that goes through it.
Y’know, none of this is answering the question raised. I know that Howard Stern’s home station in New York (it is NY, right?) has been fined for some of Howard’s antics on the air. Who fined them? The FCC, n’est-ce pas? Were there laws broken, or mere regulations violated?