Written in response to Meredith Attwell Baker, one of the two Republican Commissioners at the Federal Communications Commission, planning to step down and move into the position of head Comcast/NBC lobbyist (merged together only 4 months ago):
FCC chairmen have ALWAYS been corrupt (except Newton Minow -- as far as I know, he was kickass). Among the worst was Fowler, appointed by Reagan. Fowler thought tv was "a toaster with pictures" and struck down rules protecting children from host advertising (pikachu selling you pokemon toys), PTAR (the prime time access rule, trying to get local shows on prime time), and Fin/Syn (which made it so that independent production companies and producers, who take all the financial risk in making tv series, are able to make money off their creativity instead of selling their hopeless asses to networks).
He wasn't even the worst -- I think it was 1957-1958 when a representative named Harris led an investigation of the FCC for corruption. The FCC has 7 chairs with staggered 7-year terms. Most of them were having their kids' college paid for by networks or some other equally obvious sign of corruption, all while deregulating limits on how many stations a network could own. Thing was, Harris was getting paid off too -- he ordered his investigator, a guy named Schwartz, to not actually reveal the blatant corruption he had found. Schwartz refused to hide it, and Harris told him he'd destroy his career if he did. So Schwartz trotted over to the new york times and released it all anonymously. Congress decided to conduct hearings of the FCC, and before they even began 5 of the 7 chairs stepped down. The FCC head of the time did not, because, although he had the most blatant evidence of corruption piled against him, he was supported by the then president, Eisenhower.
But the FCC's got no choice. Unfortunately, whenever the FCC steps up to do its damn job and protect people, the politicians of congress step in and rule it "overstepped its bounds" based on whoever's the congressmen are getting paid by at that time. Even external groups get screwed over in an expensive court case if they try to be moral -- the lobbying arm of networks, the NAB, realized awhile back that host selling to kids is insanely immoral, and has huge, huge effects on kids like no one else, because at certain ages they cannot discriminate between the tv show and the ads. So they wrote guidelines (just guidelines!) against host selling, and these were struck down by congress in a pricey lawsuit later. Another case -- the "Fairness Doctrine" was a network's attempt at self-regulation, trying to make sure controversial issues got equal air time on both sides. It was upheld by the supreme court, then struck down in a veto by Reagan. Another example: the FCC tried, way back when cable companies were only CATV (cable antennae tv) to force them not to steal content. CATV was the equivalent of video piracy today -- they found towns where people couldn't get tv signals, attached a big antenna, wired the house, and bounced it down to them -- for a lofty price. And they didn't make their own content, but sometimes charged as though they had made the NBC shows themselves. If a network had a problem with them, they'd cut off the signal to that network, or fuck up its ratings some other way for them like by bouncing a competing stations' signal in from miles and miles away to a top city (think getting the top CBS shows from DC in NYC). The FCC tried to help the networks out by forbidding CATV from doing stuff like this, including cutting out certain networks and not others in a must-carry agreement. Struck down by Congress.
The real kicker is we've already lost everything to corruption, a long long long time ago. Do you have any idea what tv, what radio, originally was? Radio -- way back, by 1912 -- was a TWO-way medium. It was the internet without pictures. And it wasn't expensive -- you didn't have to buy a laptop or head to a library-- you could make a basic radio with some basic supplies, including a coffee canister. People spoke to strangers miles, sometimes hundreds of miles away. Can you imagine what the world would have been like had radio not been seized for commercial interests in 1927? Within 15 years, a medium that brought people together was boxed and sold to companies so they could sell things. Kinda reminds you of something, doesn't it? Kinda reminds you of net neutrality. The internet didn't come into full force until fairly recently. And already, companies are foaming at the mouth, trying to own the newest medium. And they'll probably win in the long run, too.
And we wonder why the US continues to have problems.
