The FCC’s Long War on Free Speech

By Blake Reed

In an era when government regulators still eye the airwaves with avarice, Digital Liberty continues to champion a simple, principled truth: absolute free speech. We have repeatedly urged the FCC to stay out of content disputes and free-market negotiations between broadcasters and affiliates. The government has no business playing speech cop. This stance isn’t just good policy; it’s a bulwark against the very censorship that has defined the FCC’s history. And with fresh attempts to weaponize old FCC rules against dissident voices, our call for total deregulation has never been more urgent.

The history of the FCC is, at its core, the story of the Left using federal power to silence the Right.

It begins with the foundational rules themselves. The Equal Time Rule (Section 315 of the Communications Act of 1934) required broadcasters who gave airtime to one political candidate to offer equal opportunities to opposing candidates. On its face, it sounded neutral. In practice, it became a tool to burden stations with costly rebuttals whenever they platformed conservative voices.

Then came the Fairness Doctrine, formally adopted by the FCC in 1949. It didn’t just demand equal candidate time — it required stations to cover “controversial issues of public importance” and present “contrasting viewpoints.” The burden fell on broadcasters to ensure balance, or risk losing their licenses. Sold as a public-interest safeguard, it quickly became a partisan weapon.

The smoking gun came in 1961. Influential United Auto Workers leaders Walter and Victor Reuther drafted what became known as the Reuther Memorandum. Sent to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the memo laid out an explicit strategy: unleash the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine against conservative radio commentators. Stations airing anti-Kennedy or anti-New Deal voices would face a blizzard of complaints demanding free reply time. The cost and hassle would force them to drop those shows entirely.

It worked. Throughout the 1960s, center-right to right-wing radio broadcasts that had flourished in the 1950s began disappearing. Stations, terrified of FCC scrutiny and license renewal fights, simply stopped carrying conservative programming.

This wasn’t an accident. Democrats had long viewed FCC regulations as the perfect instrument to neutralize opposition voices, if not for personal enrichment. Before the auction system we use today, licenses to exclusive spectrum rights were awarded by committees of bureaucrats to friends and allies.

The most notorious example was a congressman from Texas named Lyndon Johnson, who was granted a television broadcast monopoly in Austin in exchange for his support of the FCC’s appropriations. This corrupt deal not only allowed him to control the local news in the state capital, which was helpful in climbing the greasy pole of Texas politics to the U.S. Senate and ultimately the Presidency. It was also the launching point for both a business empire that allowed him to retire as one of the wealthiest former presidents.

When the Fairness Doctrine was finally repealed by the Reagan-era FCC in 1987, the dam broke. Within months, Rush Limbaugh launched his national show. Conservative talk radio exploded across the dial. Fox News followed in 1994. The Drudge Report and other online outlets were not far behind. For the first time in decades, dissident conservative voices could reach millions without the constant threat of regulatory payback.

The pattern is unmistakable. Every time Democrats have held power, they’ve reached for the FCC rulebook to silence their critics. The Left never trusted the American people to hear both sides without bureaucratic referees. The Right, by contrast, has a partisan interest in absolute free speech — because open debate favors the side that doesn’t need government protection to win the argument.

But this isn’t merely about partisan advantage. Republicans should champion absolute free speech because it is the right thing to do. Our glorious First Amendment doesn’t come with a footnote that says, “unless the FCC thinks it’s unbalanced.”

Both the left and right need to get this. The consistent advocacy for free speech and against FCC overreach ought to be a model for the Republican Party. In a free country, the remedy for bad speech is more speech — not license reviews, mandatory rebuttals, or bureaucratic balancing tests.

The lesson for today is simple: get rid of the remnants of these outdated rules once and for all. Deregulate the airwaves and let the First Amendment win. Let ideas compete without the FCC as referee. Stand with our Constitution for absolute free speech. The history of the FCC proves that anything less is just censorship dressed up as public policy.