“Hometown Henry” in the newsroom of WDBJ television in Roanoke, Virginia.
Radio, television, and cable — the “electronic” media or “broadcast media” — are far more regulated than print or digital media.
The regulation involves both the structure and content of radio, television, telegraph, satellite and cable communication in the US and territories.
The authority to regulate “in the public interest, convenience and necessity” is placed by Congress in the Federal Communications Commission, and its most important regulatory power derives from the FCC’s licensing of radio and TV broadcasting stations and networks. Stations or networks who do not abide by regulations face fines and other penalties. In rare situations, they have lost their broadcast licenses.
Radio and TV law contains many contradictions that are essentially holdovers from the technologies of a previous era. For example, why do dirty words get “bleeped” on some television programs and not others? Its because some come from traditional “over the air” broadcasting and some are only distributed by cable or internet streaming.
One trend in broadcast law is toward deregulation, but a high level of regulation is likely to remain, considering the fact that demand for the broadcast spectrum continues to exceed supply which justifies regulation under the “scarcity rationale.” Recent controversies have involved indecency on broadcast television, the structural decline of radio and cable television, and the competition with relatively unregulated new digital media.
In 2025, the Trump administration began to pressure what it sees as its “enemies” in the media by using the FCC in a partisan manner that goes far beyond the old give-and-take conservative vs liberal politics associated with broadcasting. For example, Trump-appointed FCC chair Brendan Carr has reinstated complaints brought by the Center for American Rights against NBC, ABC News and CBS, accusing them of bias against Trump during the 2024 presidential election.
Principles of regulation have included:
- Appropriate allocation of scarce resources (the “scarcity rationale.”) The original reason for licensing and regulating radio (and later TV) involved the fact that the electromagnetic spectrum was relatively narrow, and the resource was “scarce.” This is less and less true. Over the years, communications channels have expanded with the advent of 1) Cable networks in the 1970s; 2) Satellite systems in the 1990s; and 3) the Internet and Web in the 2000s; and 4) Digital broadcasting in the 2010s. As a result, the “scarcity rationale” is not as compelling as it once was, and the regulatory trend has been towards deregulation in most content and structural areas.
- Fairness, as in the “Fairness Doctrine,” is another principle. The original controversies go back to the 1920s and 30s, when the Federal Radio Commission curbed both socialist and pro-fascist broadcasting through the licensing process. The Fairness Doctrine became official in 1949 and was upheld in the Red Lion case 1969, but overturned in FCC v League of Women Voters, 1984.
- Localism for radio and television stations — The idea of localism was that radio and TV stations must serve their individual communities, at least to a small extent, and not simply repeat cheap and easily syndicated studio shows. The “must carry” rules for cable emerged from this principle. (See FCC’s “Background on Localism in Broadcasting“) .
- Universal service and neutrality for common carriers (telephone, internet) — Historically, telegraph and telephone companies started off in an atmosphere of cutthroat competition. American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) became a regulated monopolies by promising that profits would be applied to ensuring wide access to phone services at low cost. That same principle is being applied by the FCC, and contested by the telephone companies, in areas like net neutrality and municipal broadband agencies.
- Public forum, especially community access cable programming, which was strongly affirmed in Denver Area Educational Telecommunications Consortium v FCC, 1996, and weakly overturned in Manhattan Community Access Corp v Halleck, 2019.
The FCC’s overall approach to regulation is often used as an example of how an agency can be “captured” by the industry it regulates, no matter what political party hold the White House or Congress. High prices for telecommunications services, monopoly practices, and a lack of serious consumer privacy laws are all part of the FCC’s regulatory swamp, according to a 2015 Harvard ethics center study.