Posted on 02/06/2004 12:44:34 PM PST by RJCogburn
Any material element or resource which, in order to become of use or value to men, requires the application of human knowledge and effort, should be private property — by the right of those who apply the knowledge and effort. — Ayn Rand, “The Property Status of Airwaves” (1964)
Outrage over Janet Jackson’s racy half-time performance during Super Bowl XXXVIII did not go unnoticed by television’s government overseers. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is actually considering fining CBS for the broadcast.
According to the February 3 Washington Times, “Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell ... ordered an investigation of the Super Bowl halftime show.... ‘I am outraged at what I saw ... ,’ Mr. Powell said.” So-called pro-family groups and a number of talk-radio hosts are likewise disgusted with the Super Bowl show.
Okay, so people found the show revolting. But what does that have to do with the government?
A lot, unfortunately. Ever since the 1934 Communications Act was passed, the federal government has ruled the airwaves. Naturally, it was dressed up as a way of protecting the “public interest” — whatever that means — but what it really boiled down to was government control of another industry, at a time when government was racing to control everything.
A February 3 letter to the editor of the Washington Post sums the problem up perfectly. A reader complained, “I thought that the Federal Communications Commission was created in part to keep trash off the airwaves and to allow the free expression of ideas.”
What those who like government regulation of the airwaves don’t realize is this: “trash” is as much a part of the “free expression of ideas” as anything else. It’s the contemptible end of the spectrum that helps us to properly identify the praiseworthy end of the spectrum.
Neither the FCC nor any other branch of government has any business harassing broadcasters or regulating their industry. Government exists to protect people’s rights — and no one has the “right” to “good” TV. Television stations are private property — as are the frequencies they broadcast over — and don’t require any assistance from government busybodies.
Of course, there is no way of guaranteeing that TV will be “trash-free” without a government regulator — but then again, there is no way of guaranteeing “trash-free” TV even with government in charge. A quick glance at the overwhelming majority of prime-time TV programs is proof enough of that.
Still, people want to feel as if their government is looking out for them, making sure that the programs they and their children watch will be “good.” The fact that the definition of “good” changes over time really means this: the programs they and their children are watching are better identified at any given time as “government-approved.”
Is that what a free society is about?
Let's just apply that logic more broadly and see its implications.Without government roads there wouldn't be any practical way to distribute newspapers. The obvious conclusion is that it is up to the government to make sure that the roads are used properly to transmit newspapers in the public interest. </sarcasm>
The fact is that radio communication is one thing, and broadcasting is a only a special case of radio communication. The government bans radio communication by we-the-people at most frequencies, for the purpose of making "roads" which enable its favored noblemen known as FCC licensees to make their "communication" receivable (one-way only) by the many.
The First Amendment says nothing about a "right to listen," is declares a right to speak--and the right to listen is implied. The First Amendment declares a right to print--and only derivatively, the right to read what is printed. The FCC, however, says you have a right to listen--and a duty to be quiet. Anyone who confuses the First Amendment with the FCC regulations is smoking something which should be illegal.
If true, then the following should all be private property:
- airwaves
- military equipment, weaponry, technology, and bases
- police cars and facilities
- "government" capitol buldings, court buildings, office buildings, technology, supplies
- national parklands
- the Internet
In other words, we must own nothing through our own Republic.
Please get real, Randites. Come -- join the American Republic with us! :-) Afterall, we won our liberty (i.e., the right to govern ourselves) quite awhile ago now and way before revisionists from Russia came upon our shores.
BTW, if we build a complex of government management with private ownership and enterprise in all of the above, we build, by the textbook definition, fascism --on whatever scale it exists.
No thanks.... Give me good old American Capitalism, within the Founding Fathers' framework of Republicanism.
I take it, then, that you would have no problem with my 10 megawatt spark gap transmitter being set up in your neighborhood?
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?
That sort of thinking is what helps lead to tyranny, because it states that any solution will lead to tyranny, which is quite wrong.
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
So you're suggesting that there is no need for (uniform) traffic laws? You use an example of a very highly regulated activity producing no 'chaos' to suggest that no regulation is needed? Maybe we should get rid of all traffic lights and stop signs, that's just two of the thousands of regulatory devices, and see what happens. Get some common sense into your thinking.
BTW, this (use of the airwaves) is covered under international treaty. Has been for a long time. I don't see where the UN figures into the argument at all, and I don't see how arguing in favor of the wisdom of regulating the airwaves provides any 'logic' that gives the UN any part of this discussion.
"Also, private bodies cooperate on common resources all the time. Government isn't necessary to prevent a failure to manage a commons."
I don't know what to make of a statement that "government isn't necessary" other than that enforceable regulation isn't necessary. Government only makes itself present in public activities by regulation. And without any form of enforceable government regulation what's to keep any private citizen from doing whatever he likes, including disrupting communication if he so pleases (there would be no law against it)? You either agree that the government has the authority and responsibility to regulate airwaves or you do not. Which is it? I hold that it is a proper governmental function. So do the courts and the vast majority of American citizens.
templar: I take it, then, that you would have no problem with my 10 megawatt spark gap transmitter being set up in your neighborhood?
You are thinking inside too small a box. That is, you are thinking entirely inside the broadcast paradigm. Your model is, more power for me, him good. Less power for my neighbor's use, him bad.That is vacuum-tube thinking at a time when every Tom, Dick, and Harry is walking around with a radio transmitter called a cellular phone. The crucial issue is how far the radio signal needs to carry before it is picked up by a repeater, and in this day and age that need not be very far. If the technology of the cellular phone were applied to the implementation of broadcasting, why would it take more for you to broadcast throughout the area covered by a 50,000 watt AM radio station than it would to make cell-phone calls to the four corners of the area served by that 50,000-watt transmitter?
Looked at that way, the scarcity of bandwidth for broadcasting--at least, voice-quality broadcasting--in a metropolitian area is an almost perfect anachronism. What the FCC has done, and what the FCC evidently considers its charter to maintain, is to consolidate PR power beyond even what the high-speed printing press did in the nineteenth century.
What is the difference between the INTERNET and TV? Generally speaking, the difference is video quality. Video quality, and the creation by the FCC of scarce, high-quality easily accessed addresses. If you compare FreeRepublic.com to channel 2, the latter is accessed in high-speed at decent quality with a $60 plug-and-play receiver, the former is a different character of programming altogether. FR is far superior in its accessibility for transmitting to anyone in the world who has INTERNET access and knows the name of FreeRepublic.com, buried among millions of competing web sites.
Speech and printing are enumerated First Amendment freedoms;American society is accustomed--one might say, addicted--to broadcast entertainment, including broadcast journalism. I know of no political policy which I could recommend which would detoxify the resulting "sheeple" and strip those "noble" broadcasters of their titles of nobility.
listening and reading are derivitive freedoms.Thus the equality of accessibility to writing on the Internet
(and thus of reading on it) make perfect constitutional sense--whereas the government-instituted inequality of communication on broadcast cannot be translated to world of in-person speech or of printing without direct contravention of the First Amendment.
But do not accuse me of not having tried to think the issue through.
(BTW, cell phones, their frequencies, power, use, etc. are a result of government regulations).
Your question seems loaded. You mean, do we need law enforcement whether or not the sheriff is a crook?My answer is that nondiscriminatory regulation which does not create de facto titles of nobility should be instituted. But as to the Janet Jackson question, there is really no question of unconstitutional censorship, even if the FCC pulls the license of every CBS affiliate. Because CBS has no more constitutional right to broadcast at all those locations than I do. If I am not being censored right now, then CBS would not be censored then.
The problem is not 'leftist scum'. This attempt to associate something which provokes a negative emotional reaction with your side of the argument, and to attempt to discredit my side by doing so, negates my considing of your arguments as valid since this is how you justify them.
Bye.
No, thank you. Individuals should do what we do as individuals, what we do in families, what we do in our community of faith, what we do in our occupational life, and what we do in our method of collective (generic definition of "collective" here, not the Marxist, or post-Marx definition) self-governance through our republic.
(And for the Christian, all of it is to be done in Christ.)
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