When press freedom is threatened, we fly to its rescue using our editorial and legal muscle to beat back the offending government rule. It's a nice delusion. But the print media doesn't really believe in freedom of the press, just in protecting our turf. In the past, government justified control of broadcast by saying the spectrum is a scarce resource that has to be divvied up to serve the public interest and encourage a diversity of viewpoints. But today we have one-newspaper towns served by hundreds of cable, satellite, broadcast and Internet news offerings.
Information sources are numerous and varied.
The scarcity argument has vanished into the ether and it's time for FCC rules to follow. Everyone but the government and the newspaper industry seems to understand this. Last week, William Kennard, chairman of the FCC, announced a series of new programming obligations he would like to see imposed on broadcasters as a condition of their license. Among them was the provision of free air time to candidates for federal office, a requirement that has been endorsed by the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Imagine the response from those quarters if Congress tried to give away a page or two of newspaper space during the campaign season.