I grew up the 1970’s when the FCC was going after stations on the basis of liberal Fairness Doctrine complaints.
This was RIchard NixOn’s FCC that actually shut down a radio station owned by a fundamentalist preacher who supported a military victory in Vietnam. His crime was probably not supporting Nixon’s “peace talks” with the commies.
Back then, I heard Dr. Carl McIntire and other victims of the FCC’s wrath call for a new agency strictly limited to regulating technical matters like interference with someone else’s frequency spectrum and nothing else.
The Radio Television News Directors Association and other voices of the MSM back then like “Broadcasting” magazine advocated that the First Amendment applied to broadcasters as well as the newspapers.
Interesting history here.
http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa639.pdf
Broadcast Localism and the Lessons of the Fairness Doctrine