A station's equipment would be privately owned, but its right to broadcast would be regulated by government and limited by license. But aside from that, there was little, if any, interference in the content. For the past 30 years, there has been a movement toward deregulation of broadcast media. Today the FCC imposes essentially no meaningful programming standards regarding quality or quantity. The agency has lifted earlier regulations that limited the number of stations that one owner could control in any one city, and individual corporations, which have largely replaced individual humans as the licensees, may hold licenses to hundreds of radio and television stations.
Critics allege that fewer licensees results in less diversity in broadcast programming.
As corporations buy up chains of radio stations, for instance, they tend to homogenize their sound, offering less programming targeted to local audiences. The Watchdogs Given the central role of independent journalism in a democratic society and the absence of a constant regulator, citizens, interest groups, and journalistic associations have launched independent, nongovernmental efforts to monitor and report on media quality. None of them, of course, has any meaningful enforcement power, but they are effective in re-enforcing the principles of fairness, truth, and accuracy in reporting. The ombudsman may report on those complaints and how they were resolved in the pages of the publication. Few institutions are more important to a democratic society than a free and independent media.