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I see your point about FCC licenses, and how the government could if they wished apply censorship to the very ones who have these licenses today. (It would be politically tough on the government if the media was to take on the fight.) So the government bends over backwards to appear to require general benefit to the public. They accept that a liberal station runs military recruitment adds in the dead airspace of early morning and counts it as time spent on public service. It is not, and everybody knows it.

I can see the need to regulate stations transmiting power and frequencies. Without this service all broadcasts would be jammed. (Look at Mexico jamming some of our stations). If the government ever makes a move on a station based on politics it will have its head handed to it by an elitist judge.

Exactly. When I created this thread I nursed a dim hope that SCotUS would honor the plain meaning of the First Amendment, at least incrementally, by putting the FCC and its licensees on a watch list like white men are on a watch list when it comes to racism.
Recent history does not favor such illusions. McCain-Feingold intends to violate the First Amendment, and all three branches of the government signed off on it. We agree that the regulation which enables broadcasting as we know it is inconsistent with the First Amendment as it applies to print. And yet I think McCain-Feingold even purports to apply to print and to, of all things which the First Amendment most clearly assays to protect, political agitation during a political campaign.

The internet, and private publication are the tools that can balance the elite broadcast media. And more recently Fox (already with a broadcast license) decided to show the more conservative side of the news.

Fox unfortunately is (or at least was - I don't imbibe broadcast TV much, aside from football games) conservative only on the cable Fox News Channel, and not particularly so on broadcast. Given the difference in the audience size of broadcast and cable, it would be a real boon if Fox would broadcast its cable news shows.