How is a broadcast license a title of nobility?
Why should a license to broadcast your opinion require millions, maybe even billions of dollars in kickbacks to government agencies? The govt, GRANTS the right to use public airways for profit TO THE FEW. That is a title, but I don’t know about nobility. I would leave that term for Liars...Lawyers...members of the BAR. Now that I think about it, it also applies to ex Presidents, ex Senators, ex Congresscritters, ex AG’s etc including Judges. Call Obama President or former President Obama, is granting a title of nobility as surely as if we called Newt Gingrich, Lord Gingrich of Georgia.
It allows the licensee to speak in the name of the government. The phrase is, (or used to be, haven’t heard it lately) “broadcasting in the public interest as a public trustee.”Whenever you hear a “liberal” use the word “public,” the rebuttable assumption has to be that s/he actually means “government." Thomas Paine noted the phenomenon in the first two paragraphs of Common Sense
SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.You and I, lacking the imprimatur of the government, cannot speak to the public in the same way - as the phrase, “Mainstream Media” should make clear.Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil . . .
It is however not true that the FCC was the start of the problem, which actually was precipitated by the 1844 demonstration by Samuel Morse of the Baltimore-Washington telegraph and, later in that same decade, the founding of the Associated Press. Journalism treats itself - treats the AP in particular - as “the Fourth Estate,” which is a blatant allusion to a status apart from the people. First Amendment freedom of the press is properly understood, not as the establishment of an “estate,” but rather as
the right of the people
to spend their own money
to promote their own opinions. (and conversely,
the right of the people
to spend their own money
to read whatever opinions they wanna). The FCC is simply an amplification of the propaganda power of the AP, in that the “Fairness Doctrine” concept simply dismissed opinion which was not “in the mainstream” - as defined, as a practical matter, by the AP. That is, the opinion of the AP (as expressed primarily by what the AP promoted as news, and what the AP did not treat as news) is treated by the FCC not as being an opinion but (as Rush Limbaugh puts it) simply being “what is.”
This is not a power granted the federal government under the Constitution.
(Slightly off topic: commercial general-circulation journalism follows well-known rules for commercial success. Those rules systematically cause journalism to be critical of society and, as an ineluctable result, critical of government inaction, and uncritical of government action. The consequence is the blatant (to its targets) bias against conservatism).