COMMENTARY BY ERWIN KRASNOW
Public Ownership 50 Years After ‘Wasteland’
A half-century after then-FCC Chairman Newton Minow’s famous “vast wasteland” speech, the debate on the merits of broadcast regulation continues to center on the concept of “public ownership of the airwaves.” The time has come for the FCC to renounce the discredited concept of public ownership of the airwaves, bury the scarcity rationale and apply a public-interest standard based on minimally regulated marketplace forces rather than content regulation.
