How does fcc regulate broadcast media

The FCC is prohibited by law from engaging in censorship or infringing on First Amendment rights of the press. It is, however, illegal for broadcasters to intentionally distort the news, and the FCC may act on complaints if there is documented evidence of such behavior from persons with direct personal knowledge. For more information, please see our consumer guide, Complaints About Broadcast Journalism.

Herbert Hoover, the Secretary of Commerce in the s, said that radio was the first industry he ever saw that practically "begged to be regulated. The industry begged for regulation because the key players of the industry wanted the government to keep out any challengers to their oligopoly position in their markets.

Their attitude was "We got here first, now protect us from anyone else that wants to set up shop. The Telecommunications Act of essentially cut a deal with the existing broadcasters. The government would keep order on the airwaves and create a stable business environment. In exchange, since broadcasters get a special privilege to broadcast that other citizens do not, they must operate "In the public interest, convenience, and necessity.

Unfortunately, most of the public service rules" have been whittled away by the broadcasters' legal challenges in the courts. They won many of these legal battles based on the claim that the "public service rules" infringed upon their first amendment rights. These broadcasters argued that being forced to broadcast things that they did not desire to was a violation of their first amendment right to freedom of speech. There are still a few things that are required of broadcasters, but they are relatively minimal.

For example, broadcasters are still required to participate in the emergency alert system, which allows the government to take over the stations in times of emergency and extreme weather conditions. They do not pass laws or statutes , they write regulations that are administrative and technical in nature.

They do not set broad policy goals. Their policy is directed by laws passed by Congress. The FCC administers these laws. They distribute licenses to broadcast TV and radio. They regulate the cable industry, telephones, wireless communications, satellite broadcasting, and any devices which may create interference to radio communications.

They auction spectrum, collecting usage fees for the US treasury. They study questions about fair policies for governing use of emerging technologies. The FCC enforcement agents do not have guns, and can not arrest people. Generally they enforce first by gentle persuasion, and gradually escalate through their various authorities. When someone or some company violates an FCC regulation, first they give a warning and ask the violator to comply with the law.

If that does not cause the violator to comply with the law, the FCC asks the federal courts for an injunction, which is administered by federal marshals. If you violate a court injunction, you can go to jail, usually for about a year. The FCC has a very mixed history of the effectiveness of it's enforcement efforts. This is due to an enormous history of case law from the courts, where broadcasters and others have challenged the constitutionality of many FCC regulations.

It is also due to limited enforcement budgets, which force the FCC to overlook many minor infractions while they pursue the most egregious violations. For an imaginary example, the Congress could pass a law mandating that the president can have an hour per week on all TV and radio stations to address the nation. The FCC would open a rulemaking and figure out how to implement the presidential broadcasting technically, then write rules and regulations about the procedures that broadcasters would use to make the broadcasts work.

The FCC would also be in charge of fining or suspending the licenses of broadcasters who failed to comply with these rules. A broadcaster who did not like either the statute passed by Congress or the rules and regulations passed by the FCC could go to the courts, and the courts could hear arguments and decide whether the statutes, rules or regulations were constitutional.

The FCC has five Commissioners. The Commissioners are appointed by the president, and must be approved by the Senate. As a rule, only government-sanctioned licensees would have free speech rights in broadcasting.

In this sense, the scarcity of access to the airwaves is a creature of government licensure. Yet in its short seven-year existence, the FRC never issued a coherent definition of the public interest standard.

Instead, it made case-by-case determinations of individual station practices that satisfied the standard. The legislative history of the Act also offers no explanation of the origins of the broadcast public interest standard. The drafters agreed. Instead, the Act delegated implicit authority to the FCC to interpret these obligations.

Nevertheless, the FCC consistently has rejected calls to adopt concrete standards for defining the public interest. To give substance to the public interest standard, Congress has from time to time enacted its own requirements regarding what constitutes the public interest in broadcasting.

The FCC consistently has rejected calls to adopt concrete standards for defining the public interest. Despite the philosophical complications and political tensions that this arrangement entails, the U. Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the public trustee basis of broadcast regulation as constitutional.

Although the FCC has relative freedom to regulate under the broadcast public interest standard, it is restricted from censorship or interfering with free speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. In short, as Erwin G. Beginning with the Radio Act and continuing with the Communications Act, a number of key judicial decisions have addressed the implementation of the broadcast public interest standard, first by the FRC and later by the FCC.

Below is a summary of these court rulings. Here, the FRC again relied on the publicintereststandard of the Act to deny a license renewal to a radio station on the basis of the content of its programming. The U. Rather, the Commission was limited to consider the advantages enjoyed by the people of the state and their reasonable demands and the services rendered by respective stations, among other factors.

Here, the U. Supreme Court held that the public interest standard did not require the FCC to consider economic injury to existing broadcast stations when considering an application for a new station. But unlike the Pottsville Broadcasting case, the Court offered a narrower interpretation of the public interest standard, suggesting the FCC had no supervisory control over programs, business matters, or station policies. Broadcasters are required to schedule their programming accordingly or face enforcement action.

Similarly, the Commission has stated that profane material is prohibited between 6 A. Finally, the courts have ruled that obscene material is not protected by the First Amendment and cannot be broadcast at any time.

For more information about these rules, see our consumer guide. Individual radio and television station licensees are responsible for selecting all broadcast matter and for determining how their stations can best serve their communities. Broadcast licensees are responsible for choosing both the entertainment programming and the programming concerning local issues, news, public affairs, religion, sports and other subjects to be aired by the station.