Posted on 02/24/2014 11:00:47 AM PST by Jim Robinson
Bureaucracy: The FCC jumped the shark with its outrageous plan to police America's newsrooms. This grasp for a new mission signals an agency that has outlived its purpose. We have a better idea: Just scrap the FCC.
There's nothing worse than a federal agency that has lost its original mission, has nothing productive to do and, as a result, is restlessly rustling around for something to justify its existence.
That describes the Federal Communications Commission, an old-line agency founded in the 1930s to regulate a limited supply of television airwaves divided among three networks, which is now gone with the wind.
Today, television airwaves are virtually unlimited and consumers can flip through thousands of channels to find the news and entertainment they want. Besides the explosion of television choices, consumers also have the Internet, providing billions of options in a nanosecond for information on anything consumers want.
Its mission gone, the FCC is rapidly getting into mischief. It claims its mission is to lower barriers to new entry for all citizens, giving itself a civil rights patina, but its record shows a long history of erecting barriers.
Every major innovation in communication has had to scale obstacles thrown out by the FCC in an attempt to stop freedom's progress.
It's a positively medieval barricade impulse that led the FCC to try to stop the arrival of cable television in the 1970s, while on the Internet it's still hatching plan after plan to impose "net neutrality" on Internet providers, price controls that dictate how much providers can charge different kinds of customers.
The move to police the newsrooms is an effort to bring back the now-defunct "Fairness Doctrine," which forces station managers to air unpopular views outside the wishes of both owners and viewers.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
There are some functions the FCC performs that are needed, and it is tricky to imagine how they would be done without the FCC.
For example, bandwidth allocation on the electromagnetic spectrum. It not only needs direction at the local, state, and national level, but at the international level as well, and for private, commercial and government uses.
Going digital both freed up a lot of bandwidth, but resulted in a rush of new purposes far greater than the freed amounts.
Just today there were hints that even more bandwidth would be needed for various government agencies to control drones all over the US.
So if the FCC is to be reduced, hopefully with a strict prohibition against censoring content, and maybe with some more authority to prevent media market monopolies, it might be slender enough to survive.
The Republican’s won’t get rid of the E.P.A. And you expect them to get rid of the FCC?Its not going to happen.They’re cowards.
One of many Fedzilla agencies that needs to vanish.
Republicans (Nixon) created the EPA, right?
It was the Obama FCC that MADE us get this new technology for televisions.
It was the Obama FCC that lowered the standards For acquiring HAM radio licenses.
It is the Obama FCC that is pursuing broadband transmission.
It is the Obama FCC that dismantled the weather radio frequencies, once built into emergency radios sold by the Red Cross!!!
Defund these, fine ugly clerk/kooks swiftly!!
“Republicans (Nixon) created the EPA, right?”
Yes! Nixon did start the E.P.A.That’s not a reason for the Republican’s to get off their asses and kill that agency.
If they can’t kill it in total they could at least defund a large portion of it.Espechially the parts where the Congress has allowed them to usurp all control.
An excellent idea-since all that is needed is a person/group of people to issue broadcast licenses, just have a few offices to do that like any other professional license. No need for KGB to enforce Pravda-like compliance, and I’m guessing it would save a ton of taxpayer money...
Mission Creep, the FCC was “Supposed to” only regulate radio frequencies... The only FCC involvement should only be the little label on radio devices and even that is probably way too much mucking about in the affairs of citizens.
I think we could make a push to limit the FCC to “Frequencies only” and scrap the rest of the FCC, then a few years later finish the damn thing off by taking old yeller back behind the barn and putting down the governmenr hydrophobia overreach once and for all.
[ These bastards can’t (won’t) even enforce “Do Not Call.” Send them gold-plated evidence of wrongdoing, they sit on your complaint for about a year, then send you a letter saying that they couldn’t fix the problem. ]
Meanwhile the NSA probably gets a chuckle out of the Telemarketing scam calls they regularaly record....
[ These bastards can’t (won’t) even enforce “Do Not Call.” Send them gold-plated evidence of wrongdoing, they sit on your complaint for about a year, then send you a letter saying that they couldn’t fix the problem. ]
Rachel from Car member services keeps calling my damn cell phone every damn day and the FCC does NOTHING... The NSA probably gets a kick out of me reciting a list of codewords tot he crack addict on the other end who is tryign to get my credit card information...
Of course how do I file a suit against these bastards for Phone Harassment..? I guess the same folks that someone talks to about about getting their reputation back after gettign smeared by the MSM...
Not to quibble but hammering the administration's opposition in broadcast media has been the precise purpose of the FCC from its creation. FDR instituted the FCC because he couldn't abide criticism from Father Coughlin and James Gillis among others. Obama's just the first since then to use it as openly as did FDR.
Defund the FCC: Frequencies not Fascism
[ The FCC needs to be scaled back to assign frequencies so stations don’t interfere with one another.
That’s ALL they should do. ]
NAILED IT, they should just be trecording keeping clerks ONLY.
You can cut 90% of the grubment inside the beltway and never miss it.
[ I’m not sure, but I suspect the FCC is also to blame for all the “public interest” advertising run by stations seeking to ensure license renewals. I wonder, too, if “diversity” requirements are not already responsible for some programming decisions. ]
I for one am damn sick of their stuipid PSAs that have devolved down the the point of having to say crap that is self evident like: Cook your meat all the way or you get sick, don’t do drugs, buckle your seatbelt, listen to smoky bear, be a good brainless peon and don’t hurt yourself...
Not saying we don’t need them, but it is like I hear the damn things constantly and more lately, are they increasing the amount mandated to run to try to cut down the advertising profits on stations?
They own many local stations that affiliate with the networks and provide local news programs that fill four hours or more of their daily schedules.
The Lefties have whined that its wrong for one company to own so many stations and be the only “source of news” in a community.
In the area where I live Sinclair owns one station, has an operating agreement to operate another and plans to buy a third. News programs air for two hours in the morning, 90 minutes in the evening, then at 10 and 11 on their stations.
I don’t care that much about it but it makes the Left mad because the ownership is not friendly enough to the Democratic Party for their liking.
The GOPe would never dream of doing anything like that.
It would take real conservatives in Congress and the White House to accomplish that.
He signed its creation into law after Congress approved it led by Dems with RINO tagalongs.
The history of FCC use against political opponents does go back to Roosevelt’s FCC ruling it was unfair for a New England chain of stations to editorialize against Franklin Roosevelt.
When Truman was around the FCC went after George Richards, the radio station owner (Detroit, Cleveland, Los Angeles) who put Coughlin on the air in the 1930s, alleging his news programs were biased against liberals and Democrats. Richards died as the case dragged on.
Kennedy planned to use fairness complaints to shut down conservative commentators and preachers who bought radio and television time in the early 1960’s to criticize him.
Johnson inherited the operation and it was used to great effect to harass conservative broadcasters who supported Goldwater in the 1964 election.
The in Nixon’s time fairness rulings came down against the liberal media (NBC News) and conservative radio preachers who advocated a military win in Vietnam. NBC won a partial victory in court but the conservative preachers lost with one radio station taken off the air.
Nixon’s supporters in the conservative movement of the time called for “fair and balanced” news. Even Phyllis Schlafly commented in favor of the Fairness Doctrine.
THERE IS A HISTORY OF BOTH PARTIES USING THE FCC AS A POLITICAL WEAPON AGAINST OPPONENTS AND THE LATEST ACTION FITS THAT TO A TEE.
My wife has a novel approach to unwanted telemarketing calls on her cell phone. The first time she gets a call she adds the “caller” to her contacts list as “a$$hole.”
Then the next time they call it shows on her phone's ID that “a$$hole” is calling and she doesn't answer. I think she has about 50 “a$$holes” in her contact list at this point in time.
The other people you need to “thank” are the phone companies, particularly AT&T, for giving people in the Caribbean Islands DID lines into the US. I got a call the other day from a guy “selling vacations to Cancun, Mexico. When I told him that it was illegal for him to be calling me he said “FU, I'm in Mexico and you can't do a FKing thing about it,” then he hung up.
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