Justifying minority preferences in broadcasting
- Creators
- Spitzer, Matthew L.
Abstract
In Metro Broadcasting v. FCC, the Supreme Court upheld two Federal Communications Commission ("FCC" or "Commission") policies designed to increase the number of broadcasting stations owned by racial and ethnic minorities and, to a lesser extent, women. The FCC, prodded by early decisions of the Circuit Court of Appeal for the District of Columbia, has claimed for almost two decades that by increasing the diversity of ownership of the airwaves it will increase the diversity of programming content. Hence, these policies--termed "minority preference policies"--are justified as a method of diversifying broadcasting content and not as a matter of remedying any past or present discrimination. In Metro Broadcasting the majority found more than enough evidence of a nexus between minority ownership of broadcasting stations and broadcast programming diversity to allow Congress and the FCC to adopt these policies. The dissent took a completely different view of the evidence (as well as everything else) and found that it was totally insufficient to justify the minority preference policies.
Additional Information
© 1990 Matthew L. Spitzer. I received valuable help from Antoinette Cook, Wilhelmina Cooke, Erwin Chemerinsky, Richard Craswell, Gary W. Cox, David Haddock, Thomas Hazlett, Margaret Radin, Florence Setzer, Pablo Spiller, and all of the participants at workshops on this Article at the University of Chicago Law and Economics Workshop, the Hoover Institute, the University of Illinois Department of Economics, the Yale University School of Organization and Management, and the 1989 Telecommunications Policy Research Conference. Formerly SSWP 718.Attached Files
Published - sswp718_-_published.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 83098
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20171108-170155201
- Created
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2017-11-17Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2019-10-03Created from EPrint's last_modified field