Word: fcc
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Sarah, anchored off Long Island just outside the U.S. three-mile territorial limit. The idea was to get beyond the Federal Communications Commission's reach to protest the "stale" sounds offered by licensed New York stations. The pirate broadcasts stopped last week, after four days, when Coast Guardsmen and FCC agents, citing an . international treaty prohibiting broadcasts aboard ships outside national territories, boarded the Sarah and arrested Chief Engineer Alan Weiner and Disk Jockey Ivan Rothstein. The two were released pending a hearing on charges of conspiring to impede the FCC. In the meantime, station WNYG-AM on Long Island...
First enunciated in 1949, the fairness doctrine marked a recognition by the FCC that broadcasters have special obligations. Because stations are licensed by the Government and use a scarce public resource -- the electromagnetic spectrum -- the Government, it was reasoned, has the power to require that they use that resource in the public interest. Other such obligations include the equal-time rule (which ensures the same treatment for all candidates running for public office) and the personal-attack rule (which guarantees that people attacked on the air have an opportunity to reply...
...crucial way of giving ordinary citizens access to the electronic media: broadcast outlets, though more plentiful < today, are still sought-after and expensive properties available to only a few. Nor, they contend has the doctrine had the chilling effect that some claim. Between 1984 and 1986, the FCC received 19,565 fairness complaints. But it pursued only 18 of them with the station involved, and ruled that there was a violation in just one case. Andrew Schwartzman, executive director of the Washington-based Media Access Project, points out that the fairness doctrine does not require "equal time," only that "reasonable...
Unless Congress circumvents Reagan's veto (possibly by attaching the fairness-doctrine measure to another piece of legislation), the issue will once again rest with the FCC, which has been steadily eliminating or easing many Government restrictions on broadcasters. Among them: limitations on the number of stations one company can own and minimum requirements on news and public-affairs programming. Dennis Patrick, the new FCC chairman, vows to continue the trend. "The electronic media," he says, "should enjoy the same First Amendment freedom as the print media." If his view prevails, fairness may no longer be a Government call; like...
...case is closed. As Editorialist Phil Kerby once quipped, "Censorship is the strongest drive in human nature. Sex is a weak second." Some Fundamentalists have focused their sects' drive on getting Playboy and Penthouse removed from the shelves of 7- Eleven stores. Pressure groups have successfully lobbied the FCC to slap down Howard Stern and the other risk jockeys of raunch radio. In 1984 feminists won passage of an Indianapolis ordinance that defined pornography as the "graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/ or words" -- thereby implicitly condoning gay S-M porn (in which men may subordinate...