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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   358 thread views

Transnational Thursday for June 18, 2026

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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imposed on radio and television broadcasters

One thing that's often missed about the Fairness Doctrine is that it only ever applied to broadcasters licensing RF spectrum on the basis that it truly is a limited resource. We can't all start FM stations in the normal band or we'll just interfere with each other and nobody gets radio. Location, carrier frequency, and ranges/power of transmitters matters a lot for a usable network, and so are already regulated. If the maximum number of radio stations in a city is maybe a dozen, it makes sense to apply some bounds on the general public interest to what those are transmitting.

The rules do not, and as far as I'm aware, never have applied to point-to-point connections. Cable TV isn't a limited resource: not only are there more channels on cable, you can just run a second set of wires everywhere and get even more channels. Fox News and CNN don't have government-issued semi-monopoly status, and you can comparatively easily start your own. The Internet is also point-to-point routed: everyone gets their own packets, and you can just start your own website. Not that the economic case for either here is trivial, but the stated reason for non-content-neutral rules on broadcast in the US exists purely because of the monopoly status, and probably don't pass a 1A bar otherwise.

I have never heard about any serious application of this rule, at least recently. Maybe it did happen, but if so, it was of little consequence. I can't remember any RF broadcast outlet that would have been on any consequence in the last decades on the political scene, except for NPR, which as always been left-biased without any consequences as far as I remember. So practically this rule seems to be effectively non-existent.

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