When was radio regulated

Rulemaking not initiated. Supplemental Report and Order. Denied petitions for reconsideration. Petitions for reconsideration denied or dismissed. Petition for reconsideration denied. Type-acceptance of modulation monitors. Clear Channels before 6 A. Presunrise Service Authority to Specify 6 A. Rule correction for Daylight Saving Time. FCC ]. See also FCC OCE12, March, Terrain roughness adjustment suspended. Rules changes: broadcast equipment, time brokerage agreements, music service contracts.

Broadcasters and special interest groups. Broadcast licensee exception to recording device beep tone. Comparison of kHz vs. Suspension continued. Referenced in former rule Section Section See also Nature of Noncommercial Educational Broadcasting.

Political programming, reasonable access. Horse racing info over SCA. Time brokerage and share time operation. See also Noncommercial Nature of Educational Broadcasting. Request for stay denied. FM translator expansion denied. Supreme Court found that determining the best interest of the public is difficult and that deference must be given to Congress and the experience of the FCC, while remaining sensitive to First Amendment interests.

Only when the interests of the public are found to outweigh the private journalistic interests of the broadcasters will government power be asserted within the framework of the [] Act.

License renewal proceedings, in which the listening public can be heard, are a principal means of such regulation. Internally, the FCC has been active in assessing the import of the statutory public interest standard for broadcasting. The Commission has stated that Congress deliberately placed the public interest standard in the Communications Act to provide the Commission with maximum flexibility in dealing with the ever-changing conditions of the field of broadcasting:.

The Commission was not created solely to provide certainty. Rather, Congress established a mandate for the Commission to act in the public interest. We conceive of that interest to require us to regulate where necessary, to deregulate where warranted, and above all, to assure the maximum service to the public at the lowest cost and with the least amount of regulation and paperwork.

In reviewing public interest determinations, according to Robert L. Pacholski, writing in a article published in the Texas Law Review 62 Tex. The Communications Act of , as amended, also provides more specific guidelines for close cases. For example, if more than one applicant requests the same broadcast channel, then the FCC must determine which applicant will best serve the public interest.

And if the applicants are equally qualified, the Commission must select randomly among them in order to award the license.

Overall, with regard to broadcast license renewals, applications historically have been granted with few exceptions. The FCC lacks power to remove the basic statutory framework of the public interest standard; however, the more autonomy the Commission grants to its licensees, the more its interpretation of the public trusteeship model has come to resemble primarily a marketplace approach.

Although some commentators have argued that the FCC is abandoning the statutory public interest approach in favor of the marketplace, the FCC disagrees by arguing that the public interest can be met through reliance on market forces.

Because the Act embraced a public trusteeship model instead of a pure marketplace one, courts have maintained limits on the extent that the FCC can utilize market mechanisms as a spectrum allocation alternative. The FCC has not moved beyond these judicial limits to date.

None of its recent deregulatory initiatives have granted broadcast licensees the autonomy to change the principal use of Commission-allocated spectrum from broadcasting to some other type of telecommunications service that may be justified by market forces rather than by a more generalized public interest standard.

Three critiques of the public interest standard are worthy of timely review by the th Congress if it moves ahead with undertaking significant amendments to the Communications Act of Former National Telecommunications and Information Administration Administrator Henry Geller suggests an alternative system that he believes will work more successfully:. That goal, however, is not being achieved. Bullard and fellow commissioners Eugene Sikes, O.

The commission sent comprehensive questionnaires to all broadcasters designed to elicit information, especially about their record of public service and their plans for future public service. It held public hearings to determine how best to eliminate station interference from other signals. The commission decided that each radio station would be separated by 10 kilocycles. The commission also granted temporary permits to all broadcasters who had been issued a license by the secretary of commerce under the Radio Act of The commission created several classes of stations with varying levels of transmitter power.

Some stations were restricted to low transmitter power and were licensed to share their frequencies with other broadcasters. Others were designated as daytime-only stations. And still others were allowed to broadcast alone on a frequency clear channel with high-power transmitters.

Lawmakers vigorously debated a broad set of issues, ranging from questions of ownership and regulatory authority to the protection of free speech and the prevention of monopoly. A bill endorsed by both the House and Senate emerged a little over a year later, after the interference problem was said to have grown worse, and it finally arrived on the desk of President Calvin Coolidge on February 23, The bill would create a Federal Radio Commission with the power to license radio stations for two years at a time.

President Coolidge had endorsed radio reform in his most recent annual message to Congress but had requested that all regulatory power be granted to the Secretary of Commerce, not to a commission.