You support the ownership and free use of broadband radio jammers I presume? After all, that is unregulated use of the airwaves. Get some common sense into your thinking. Without regulation and regulatory standards there would be no practical use of the airwaves at all. Why do you think the FCC was set up to start with?
My car is licensed by a state, and insured under state regulation. Yet I can drive anywhere in the U.S., and in Canada, too. No "chaos."
States, and nations, for that matter, are very capable of harmonizing regulations. You logic would allow the U.N. to claim regulatory supremacy over anything potentially transnational.
I am not a mindreader, and it really doesn't matter what the motives were. What matters is the practical effect on the Republic. Janet Jackson's "coup" hardly defines that effect, but is one symptom of it.IMHO the effect of the FCC is to create titles of nobility. Certain people are selected to be able to tell us "what is going on." That is "wonderful;" everyone is dying of curiosity to know what is really going on. The trouble is, of course, that nobody knows what is really going on, except God. But for free, just a little of your time spent listening to a few commercials, these princes will condescend to share with you the "objective truth."
The problem is not the commercials, the problem is "objective truth," a.k.a., "broadcasting in the public interest." The noblemen of the PR business bend every effort to insinuate that what interests the public is "the public interest." It is not so much that the medium is the message as that the genre of publishing is the message.
The best way to illustrate the problem is by reference to Florida 2000. The public was on pins and needles to know "what was going on" with the election of a new president. We thought Bush would win, but we didn't know, so we were glued to the TV set, channel surfing between news programs. And what did we get? The truth?
What we got was a PR campaign designed with malice aforethought to throw the election to Gore. We got quick calls of states for Gore and slow calls, the margin of victory being the same, for Bush. We even got a call of FL for Gore before all the polls were "closed"--and only entry into the queue, not the voting itself, stopped at the time of poll "closing"--at a time when Bush had a nontrival lead over Gore in the raw count in FL.
After the polls were closed in most of the country--certainly after it could not affect the vote in FL--the call for Gore was retracted, and we waited for the final result. Finally, about 3AM, Fox called FL for Bush. Gore started to concede, then balked. From then on, the networks had nothing to say about their own erroneous call of FL for Gore but vociferously attacked the Bush relative at Fox for establishing the idea in the public mind that Bush had won.
Why were they so bitter against Fox for that? As Ann Coulter points out in Slander, the networks' bitterness over the call (which a year of re-re-recounting ultimately vindicated) betrayed the fact that they knew perfectly well that their early call for Gore had tended to move the election toward Gore. It is obvious on its face that Fox's sin was in doing, after the polls were closed but before the nth recount, what the networks had done while the polls were open.
The public was dying of curiousity to hear "reports from the front" but the public interest is in the conduct of elections without undue influence by government-licensed agents. The public is interested, even fascinated--but the public interest is in conflict with the satisfaction of that curiosity. You may be interested in exactly who I will vote for in the next election, but nobody will be allowed in the voting booth with me because although making that knowledge public could interest the public it would not be in the public interest.
You will rightly point out that "the freedom of speech, and of the press" implies that information which interests the public will in fact be published, even sometimes in conflict with the public interest. But since the government does not have authority over in-person speech or over the printing press, the imprimatur of the government cannot be implied in the operation of literal speech and the literal press.
Ineluctably the FCC implies the government's imprimatur on the operation of its licensees. And so you have the government imprimatur on violation of the public trust, in the case of Ms. Jackson's flashing the children of the nation's NFL fans and in case of broadcast journalism's reporting--never mind its pseudo-scientific extrapolations of--exit poll data in time to influence voting.
And the gathering of exit-poll data is in dubious accord with the secret ballot principle and the provisions of the laws which institute it. Which is why, according to Bill Sammon, the "selected precints" from which exit poll data are gathered are only "selected" from the precints from which that data can be obtained without the pollsters getting arrested.The Constitution was designed to implement a republic, the officers of which are chosen by voters on the basis of character as well as temperment. Journalism in general, and TV journalism in particular, bombard the public with authoritative claims of the "public interest" as suggested by polls the wording of which may be designed to elicit a favored response. We-the-people are sovereign only on election day, and the PR establishment considers itself entitled to control the election results. The reason there is Democrat but not (on any systematic national scale) Republican vote fraud is quite simple; the PR establishment does not respect popular sovereignty, and is dead-set against Republican governance. The Republican Party is the party of the middle class, generally in favor of being left alone.The Democrat Party is the party of "the poor" willing to be taken care of (and have the Republicans controlled) by the government--but financed and led by the often upper-income people with a lust to feel superior to the middle class (and, obviously, "the poor"--but a patronizing pretense of identification with "the poor" against "the rich" is for such people a small price to pay for seperation from the middle class).
Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate