How the FCC Became the Speech Police

[Kamaji]

How the FCC Became the Speech Police

The constitutionally anomalous status of broadcasting invites government meddling.

Jacob Sullum | From the February/March 2026 issue

In 1964, journalist Fred J. Cook published Barry Goldwater: Extremist of the Right, a 186-page attack on the Republican candidate in that year's presidential election. As economist Thomas W. Hazlett notes in his history of broadcast regulation, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) "arranged for Grove Press to publish the book," which portrayed Goldwater as "so extreme that he cuts a positively ridiculous figure." The general public bought 44,000 copies. The DNC bought 72,000.

Conservative criticism of Cook's book resulted in a landmark Supreme Court decision that upheld federal regulation of broadcast speech—a power that several presidents had used to target their political opponents. Although the Reagan administration repudiated that illiberal tradition, President Donald Trump has revived it, as illustrated by the 2025 suspension of Jimmy Kimmel, the ongoing transformation of CBS News, and Trump's habitual threats against TV stations that air news coverage he views as unfair or unbalanced.

The Supreme Court blessed the legal rationale for such meddling in a case that started with a right-wing evangelist's reaction to Cook's critique of Goldwater. A few weeks after Goldwater lost to President Lyndon B. Johnson in a historic landslide, Billy James Hargis railed against Cook during his Christian Crusade radio show.

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That "scarcity" rationale for regulating broadcast content, which never made much sense, has not aged well. And the FCC itself abandoned the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 after concluding that it had a chilling effect on speech—a danger that the Supreme Court had deemed too speculative to consider in Red Lion.

Trump nevertheless thinks broadcasters have a legal obligation to be fair. "When 97 percent of the stories [about me] are bad," he told reporters in September, "it's no longer free speech." When TV networks "take a great story" and "make it bad," he added, "I think that's really illegal." Because broadcasters are "getting free airwaves from the United States government," Trump thinks, they should lose their licenses if their programming is biased against him and his supporters.

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Source:  https://reason.com/2026/01/18/how-the-fcc-became-the-speech-police/