This morning on Minnesota Public Radio, I debated two proponents of FCC efforts to regulate TV violence. I don't know how long it will be up on their website, but you can currently listen to a stream of the entire show at this link on their website. I was up against Doug Gentile of the National Institute on Media and the Family and Melissa Caldwell of the Parents Television Council.

I've got a new editorial up over on the City Journal website today about the FCC's new effort to regulate violence on television. I begin by noting that the FCC probably wouldn't approve of my grandmother's viewing choices for me back in the 1970s since I probably watched every episode of "The Three Stooges" with her as a kid. "Would The Three Stooges constitute 'excessively violent' programming unfit for a young child?" I ask. Who knows, and that's just one of the many problems with the FCC's new effort. See the rest of my editorial for details.

If you're interested in this subject, I also want to draw your attention to this excellent editorial by First Amendment guru Robert Corn-Revere on the Freedom Forum website. Bob does an excellent job outlining the legal / constitutional issues that the FCC report ignored in its report. Bob's essay is part of an excellent online symposium that the Freedom Forum has put together featuring many distinct viewpoints on this issue.

Finally, conservative columnist Cal Thomas had a column in The Washington Times a few days ago opposing the FCC's regulatory effort. He argued that: "Anyone concerned about preserving the First Amendment and the rights it guarantees to free speech and free expression should worry about this latest assault on the Constitution. Conservatives who oppose regulation of talk radio, which most of them like, must be consistent and oppose overregulation of TV content they dislike." Good for you, Cal !

George Will, conservative columnist for Newsweek and The Washington Post, is kind enough to cite my recent City Journal essay in his new article that takes liberals to task for trying to revive the so-called Fairness Doctrine. He argues that:

Some illiberal liberals are trying to restore the luridly misnamed Fairness Doctrine, which until 1987 required broadcasters to devote a reasonable amount of time to presenting fairly each side of a controversial issue. The government was empowered to decide how many sides there were, how much time was reasonable and what was fair.

By trying to again empower the government to regulate broadcasting, illiberals reveal their lack of confidence in their ability to compete in the marketplace of ideas, and their disdain for consumer sovereignty--and hence for the public.

Indeed. Will goes on to cite the multiplicity of media options we have at our disposal today relative to the past but he notes--in agreement with my recent City Journal essay--that that's just not good enough for some liberals who want to guarantee that certain views get heard more than others that win out in the marketplace of ideas.

The FCC has just issued its long-awaited report on Violent Television Programming and Its Impact on Children. Unsurprisingly, it recommends that the government should assume a great role in regulating the video content that comes into our homes. The agency concludes that: “We believe that further action to enable viewer-initiated blocking of violent television content would serve the government’s interests in protecting the well-being of children and facilitating parental supervision and would be reasonably likely to be upheld as constitutional.” (p. 15)

Ambiguity Defined
Ironically, however, the FCC’s report goes on to undercut its own argument for regulation again and again because of the stunning level of ambiguity surrounding everything they propose. For example, in the second paragraph of the report, the FCC notes that “A broad range of television programming aired today contains [violent] content, including, for example, cartoons, dramatic series, professional sports such as boxing, news coverage, and nature programs.” Is the agency saying such things could be regulated? They never tell us.

Or consider the endless number of questions raised by this paragraph on pages 20-21:

We believe that developing an appropriate definition of excessively violent programming would be possible, but such language needs to be narrowly tailored and in conformance with judicial precedent. Any definition would need to be clear enough to provide fair warning of the conduct required. A definition sufficient to give notice of upcoming violent programming content to parents and potential viewers could make use of, or be a refinement of, existing voluntary rating system definitions or could make use of definitions used in the research community when studying the consequences of violent programming. For more restrictive time channeling rules, a definition based on the scientific literature discussed above, which recognizes the factors most important to determining the likely impact of violence on the child audience, could be developed. For example, such a definition might cover depictions of physical force against an animate being that, in context, are patently offensive. In determining whether such depictions are patently offensive, the Government could consider among other factors the presence of weapons, whether the violence is extensive or graphic, and whether the violence is realistic. (p. 20-21)

Let’s try to unpack some of this because defining “excessive violence” is really the core of this debate.

According to today's Washington Post, the FCC's report on televised media content will be out within the week, and you can expect a whole lotta regulatin' to be goin on once it hits the Hill.

In their article, "FCC Seeks To Rein In Violent TV Shows: Agency Will Recommend Law to Regulate Broadcast And Basic Cable Content," Washington Post staff writers Paul Farhi and Frank Ahrens report that:

The Federal Communications Commission has concluded that regulating TV violence is in the public interest, particularly during times when children are likely to be viewers -- typically between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., FCC sources say. ... The report -- commissioned by members of Congress in 2004 and based on hundreds of comments from parents, industry officials, academic experts and others -- concludes that Congress has the authority to regulate "excessive violence" and to extend its reach for the first time into basic-cable TV channels that consumers pay to receive.

PFF’s Digital Age Communications Act (DACA) project included a report on spectrum policy by a working group of experts that Larry White of NYU and I co-chaired. That report noted the “widespread dissatisfaction with the legacy command-control-system” and that “the costs associated with inefficient utilization of the spectrum under [that system] have become enormous.” The report went on to endorse a market system as the best way to “assure that spectrum is allocated to its best and highest-valued uses,” noting that “there is no serious contender for a system that can be expected to perform as well or better.”

An (almost) as articulate a case for a market-based system is contained in an article written by Reed Hundt when he was FCC Chairman (and coauthored by Greg Rosston who was also member of our DACA working group). (See IEEE Communications Magazine, December 1995). That article notes that “The key to this investment boom [then occurring in wireless] is the FCC’s decision to grant flexibility in the use of PCS spectrum. PCS licensees have the flexibility to provide the services most valuable to consumers in the same way companies throughout our economy provide the services consumers demand. This is a sea change in FCC policy, and it should be continued.”

If you look back at all the work we have done here on Net Neutrality (NN), it seems to me that the common theme of our collective opposition to regulation is that we just don't know what we're getting ourselves into. No doubt, we're skeptics about most regulatory proposals, but with good reason. Our government does not have a very good track record when it comes to regulating communications or high-technology markets for the purposes of improving consumer welfare. In fact, just the opposite is usually the result. Consumers typically are on the losing end of grandiose regulatory schemes that are suppose to serve "the public interest." As a century's worth of communications industry regulation proved, regulation typically results in stagnant markets, lack-luster innovation and limited consumer choice.

That's why yesterday's new Notice of Inquiry about Net neutrality from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has me so worried. It tees up all the questions that we've been asking here for the past few years. The difference is, of course, that now the whole world is going to flood the agency with answers and many of them will entail regulatory action.

Just the way the FCC frames some of the questions in this Notice concerns me, especially in terms of the breadth of what the agency is investigating. Consider how the discussion kicks off:

I think we can all agree that Don Imus is an ass and that his comments about the Rutgers University women's basketball team were offensive and racist. He has rightly been universally condemned for his actions, and his employers -- CBS Radio and MSNBC -- have terminated his morning talk show program as a result.

But does his behavior justify something more in the form of a regulatory response? Some people think so, including the Rev. Al Sharpton and Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (D-Mich.), the head of the Congressional Black Caucus. As this L.A. Times article notes, Rev. Sharpton and Rep. Kilpatrick argue that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) should sanction the CBS Radio stations that aired the Imus remarks. Rep. Kilpatrick has also suggested that the FCC should mandate diversity training for CBS Radio and MSNBC employees who allowed the show to be broadcast.

It goes without saying that any effort by the FCC to regulate hate speech is going to raise a number of sticky constitutional issues. As former FCC Chairman Richard E. Wiley tells the L.A. Times: "Lets say there was a discussion of some minority issue, and somebody said something that somebody took offense to. You can see how very quickly it could get very complex constitutionally." And as Tom Taylor, editor of Inside Radio, told the Times: "You'd have to build another building just for all the complaints" the FCC would receive, he said.

I've spent the last 7 years closely monitoring the ongoing debate over media ownership in this country and what I find most intriguing about it is the inherent schizophrenia of the media criticism emanating from the political Left. That is, although we find ourselves in the midst of unprecedented explosion of media options and diversity, critics on the Left are still spinning gloom-and-doom stories about our modern media environment and the state of deliberative democracy. But they are doing so from two radically different perspectives.

This is the subject of a new article of mine that appears in the latest issue of the City Journal entitled "The Media Cornucopia." In the essay I note that:

This media cornucopia is a wonderful development for a free society--or so you'd think. But today's media universe has fierce detractors, and nowhere more vehemently than on the left. Their criticisms seem contradictory. Some, such as Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, contend that real media choices, information sources included, remain scarce, hindering citizens from fully participating in a deliberative democracy. Others argue that we have too many media choices, making it hard to share common thoughts or feelings; democracy, community itself, again loses out. Both liberal views get the story disastrously wrong. If either prevails, what's shaping up to be America's Golden Age of media could be over soon.

I go on to describe these two competing schools of Leftist media criticism, which I label the "scarcity-obsessed" critics versus the "information-overload" critics. I discuss the views of the various theorists who occupy each camp of thinking and explain how they have quite successfully used these competing theories of media criticism to spin reality out of the political dialogue about these issues. In the end, I conclude that: "What unifies the two schools of leftist media criticism, beneath their apparent opposition, is pure elitism. ... Both liberal groups would love to put their thumbs on the scale and tilt the media in their preferred direction."

Anyway, if you are interested in reading the entire essay, the folks at the City Journal have posted it on their site here.

Sitting here in the convenient but glumly industrial Kansas City International Airport that trumpets its free wi-fi connections on billboards both in- and outside the terminal. One problem with the fabulous free wi-fi. In my first 10 minutes of trying to log on, I get this message: "There are too many users logged on. Please try again later." Tragedy of the commons, anyone? Why not make all of us business travelers pay to ration and signal for sufficient capacity?