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To: ElkGroveDan
Ought to be a law against it. LOL
13 posted on 08/15/2002 4:50:38 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
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To: Jim Robinson
Ought to be a law against it. LOL
I'm dead serious, there should be.

It is IMHO no accident that the First Amendment protects the right to listen/read only as an implication of the right to speak/print.

The government, in the form of the FCC, defines frequency bands in which it grants you a "right to listen" but denies you the right to speak. That's fundamentally in conflict with First Amendment principle, and that fact must eventually be faced. If you blow away the smoke, broadcasting is a species of telecommunication, not an inherent characteristic of wireless. Analog communications puts you into the mindset of frequency channels. Wireless internet, OTOH, does not require dedicated frequency channels for every individual transmission.

The point is that FCC "regulated" broadcasting is obsolescent, in that digital wireless can transcend the supposed scarcity of bandwidth which is the raison d' etre of the unconstitutionally licensed communication known as broadcast. And that "regulated" belongs in quotes because, as the Nov 2000 fiasco dramatized, broadcast licensees are not even being prevented from intruding on the election-day vote.

Broadcast licensees should, from their priveledged position, have no input to politics at all--and since journalism is and always was politics, that means broadcast journalism is illegitimate. Throw in a ban on broadcast political ads, and you have campaign cost reform that's actually constitutional!


46 posted on 08/16/2002 7:14:42 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
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