Page 461 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

0 | Regulat ng the A rwaves: “A Toaster w th P ctures” or a Publ c Serv ce?

and the Internet have diversified the media landscape, eliminating the need for
ownership restrictions.
In 1941, the FCC imposed its first restriction on media ownership: it prohib-
ited a single company from owning more than one same-service (AM or FM)
station in the same market. Five years later, it stated that a company could not
own more than one national radio network. In 1964, the FCC put restrictions on
TV station ownership, ruling that an entity under specific circumstances could
own at most two stations in the same market. In the 1970s, the FCC also pro-
hibited cross-ownership of a newspaper and a broadcasting station in the same
market and cross-ownership of a radio and television station in the same mar-
ket. The FCC also placed caps on how many broadcasting stations a company
could own nationwide.
The turn to deregulation loosened many of these ownership restrictions. The
1996 Telecommunications Act raised the national limit on how many television
stations a company could own and erased a national limit on radio station own-
ership. In 2003, the FCC voted to further relax media ownership restrictions and
was met by heavy public and congressional opposition.
At stake in these battles over media ownership has been a fundamental dis-
agreement over the relationship between media ownership and media content.
On the one side, people argue that diversity in ownership promotes diversity in
viewpoints expressed over the air. On the other, detractors posit that what pro-
motes diversity of views is the diversity of media outlets available to consumers,
regardless of who owns them. It is a battle that may persist as a mainstay on the
FCC’s agenda, as media concentration and the development of new technologies
continue to change the media landscape.

see also À La Carte Cable Pricing; Cable Carriage Disputes; Children and Ef-
fects; Communication Rights in a Global Context; Conglomeration and Media
Monopolies; Government Censorship and Freedom of Speech; Media and the
Crisis of Values; Media Reform; Minority Media Ownership; National Public
Radio; Net Neutrality; Obscenity and Indecency; Pirate Radio; Pornography;
Public Access Television; Public Broadcasting Service.
Further reading: Brainard, Lori A. Television: The Limits of Deregulation. Boulder, CO:
Lynne Rienner, 2004; Creech, Kenneth. Electronic Media Law and Regulation. Boston:
Focal, 2000; Douglas, Susan J. Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899–1912. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987; Hendershot, Heather. Saturday Morning
Censors: Television Regulation Before the V-Chip. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1998; Horowirz, Robert Britt. The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of
American Telecommunications. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989; Krattenmaker,
Thomas G., and Lucas A. Powe, Jr. Regulating Broadcast Programming. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1994; McChesney, Robert. Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communica-
tion Politics in Dubious Times. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998; McChesney,
Robert. Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for the Control
of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928–1934. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; Ray, Wil-
liam B. FCC: The Ups and Downs of Radio-TV Regulation. Ames: Iowa State University
Press, 1990; Smulyan, Susan. Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broad-
casting, 1920–1934. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994; Streeter,