FCC’s Blow To Standard General-Tegna Deal Is Runaway Regulation
Former FCC Chairman Mark Fowler on the commission ordering a Media Bureau formal hearing on the Standard General-Tegna merger: “The commission has applied the standard in an unprecedented, unconstitutional way by modifying the intended purpose of the statute to its customized purpose.”
Mark Fowler: FCC Guilty Of ‘Broadband Bias’
The former FCC chairman writes in The Wall Street Journal: “For the past five years, the FCC has cheered wireless broadband as the future of communications. But television broadcasters have much of the spectrum that wireless companies want. So the FCC has intervened to reassign chunks of spectrum from one group to another — and its broadband bias comes at the expense of broadcasters.” WSJ subscribers can read the full story here.
Why The Print Model For Broadcasting Works
Former FCC Chairman Mark Fowler: “No outside force or coercion, no loss of freedom of the press or speech, is necessary to produce all sorts of broadcast programming in the public interest. It may not always be of highest quality, but is the government to be the arbiter of what is quality? And, for the diehard critics, I challenge them to name one controversial issue of public importance, federal, local, or international, not covered by the broadcast media. They cannot.”
