From the Beginning, Politics Triggered Broadcasting
Media scholars argued that politics, not technology, shaped American broadcasting from 1927 on, repeatedly shielding incumbents from competition.
WASHINGTON, June 25, 2026 — The public interest standard that has governed American broadcasting for nearly a century was a political instrument from its inception in 1927, a panel of media historians and economists said Wednesday.
The regulatory machinery built around that public interest standard repeatedly worked to protect incumbents, suppress innovation, and shape political power, some media historians and economists said during the Broadband Breakfast Live Online session examining a 50-year block of communications history from 1927 to 1976.
The event was the second of three special BroadbandLive events celebrating 250 Years of American Independence and 150 Years of American Telecommunications. The webcasts are also serving as a sort of preview for an in-person event celebrating America250 / Telecom150 on October 1, 2026, at the National Press Club.
Spectrum, scarcity and the birth of a standard
The story began with scarcity. The 1927 Radio Act was driven by lawmakers and broadcasters who wanted "more political discretion" before broadcasting "really went out to common law property rights as enforced by the courts," said Thomas Hazlett, Macaulay Endowed Professor of Economics at Clemson University.
That early philosophy favored well-financed commercial stations, explained Allison Perlman, associate professor of history and film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Advertising-supported broadcasters seeking large audiences "could best serve the public interest" under the commission's logic, she said, while stations licensed to "labor unions or educational groups or immigrant communities were understood to be targeting narrow audiences." As a result, "the more valuable frequencies went to commercial broadcasters."
The decisions were hardly uncontested, noted Michael Sokolow, chair of communication and journalism at the University of Maine, who said "it wasn't quite as smooth" as often portrayed, but "a little bit more contentious in development."
That contention mattered, agreed Katheryn Cramer Brownell, professor of history at Purdue University, because business interests pushed "regulators to make decisions that are going to benefit their pocketbook."
Broadcasting also concentrated power in the executive branch, Brownell said, allowing the president "to assume a much more prominent public role."
The New Deal "really depended on broadcasting to sell the New Deal," she said, because it could circumvent hostile newspapers.
Spectrum control could even crush innovation outright, Hazlett added, citing FM inventor Edwin Howard Armstrong, whose technology was undone by a postwar band reallocation justified by a "nonsense theory" about sunspots that killed FM for 20 years and "led to the suicide of this great inventor," Hazlett said.
Free speech versus licensing
The tension between licensing broadcasters and free speech was ever-present, panelists said.
The Fairness Doctrine, adopted in 1949, replaced an earlier FCC rule barring broadcasters from editorializing, said Perlman. She called the Fairness Doctrine "an imperfect policy" but defended its premise that the First Amendment imposed "an obligation to serve the communication needs of the public" as "more important than protecting the individual speech rights of broadcasters."
Hazlett pushed back, saying that the doctrine reduces speech by awarding free equal time, essentially imposing a tax on controversial speech and hence giving broadcasters an economic incentive to avoid controversy.
Perlman said the doctrine empowered the public. Often conflated with the equal time rule, which governs political candidates, the Fairness Doctrine instead is a tool that can be wielded by civil rights, feminist and environmental groups. Though such groups were rarely about to get licenses revoked, they attracted "the attention of local broadcasters to start paying attention to members of [the public] that they otherwise might have ignored."
But Hazlett contended that Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC, decided by the Supreme Court in 1969, itself was a case in which Democratic political operatives demanded free airtime to "harass and intimidate" religious and conservative stations. That, he said, was a chilling effect that was the opposite of free speech.
Cable's long suppression and the regulatory graveyard
Those same incumbent protections then turned against cable. Though cable dates to 1948, regulators long treated it as a "passive antenna" that merely extended broadcast signals into rural and mountainous communities, Brownell said.
Cable operators "could not compete in the top 100 television markets," she added, until they recognized the "business potential" in deregulation.
The FCC waged what Hazlett called "a jihad against cable coming in to compete with broadcasting," fearing it would "siphon viewers and profits away from the regulated industry."
He described the episode as "an amazing story of regulatory capture," in which the FCC "water is being carried" on behalf of broadcasters to block competition. Such suppressed technologies, he said, formed "an entire graveyard."
Only deregulation of the late 1970s opened the market, Brownell added, noting that even Richard Nixon backed loosening cable rules to "undermine the political, economic, and social power of commercial broadcast."
The event was moderated by Broadband Breakfast Managing Editor Ted Hearn.
