PART I - SERVING AUDIENCES

Summary

Economics-minded critics of government intervention in the media realm raise a constant refrain: interventions are paternalistic and treat viewers as “helpless or obstinate.” Interventions assume that viewers are “incapable of wise choice.” A free society must treat audiences as perfectly able to know and choose what they want to read, watch, and listen to. Market incentives lead media producers to provide audiences with what they want.

In his classic article arguing for deregulation of broadcasting, former FCC chairman Mark Fowler explained that the government “should rely on the broadcasters” ability to determine the wants of their audiences through the normal mechanisms of the marketplace.” As with any other product, “[i]n the fully deregulated marketplace, the highest bidder would make the best and highest use of the resource.” Fowler summed up this view of the media with his famous remark that “television is just another appliance … a toaster with pictures.” Fowler's deregulatory perspective swept through policy-making circles in the United States. It became received wisdom in executive, legislative, and judicial branch thinking about media policy. In the last decades of the twentieth century, deregulation of the media (and much else) became a global phenomenon. I argue here that this approach is fundamentally wrong.

My primary concern is with the creation and provision of media content. The pervasive antiregulatory refrain, however, has recently been equally loud in the related context of the infrastructure for delivering communication content. It was overwhelmingly evident in the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, adopted as an act “to promote competition and reduce regulation.”