The Communications Act of 1934 and the Idea That the Airwaves Belong to the Public

On June 19, 1934, Franklin Roosevelt signed a bill that most Americans alive at the time would never read and almost none of them would remember. It was not the Securities Exchange Act, which he had signed a couple of weeks earlier, and it was not anything with a parade attached. It was the Communications Act, a long, dry statute that folded telephone and telegraph regulation together with the regulation of radio and handed all of it to a new body called the Federal Communications Commission. Buried in its language was a phrase the law had borrowed from an older radio statute, and that phrase carried a radical idea in plain clothes: a station could use the airwaves only if doing so served "the public interest, convenience, and necessity." Nobody owned the spectrum. The public did. Broadcasters were, in effect, renting it.

In short: The Communications Act of 1934 created the FCC and made broadcasters trustees of airwaves that belong to the public, licensed on the promise of serving the public interest. Over decades that promise was hollowed out by deregulation, consolidation and the rise of media the law never imagined. The bargain still matters, and the argument for reviving it is worth making carefully.

Before 1934, the dial was a shouting match

Radio in the early 1920s was a frontier, and it behaved like one. Anyone with a transmitter could start broadcasting, and hundreds of people did: department stores, newspapers, churches, universities, hobbyists, hucksters. Stations crowded onto the same frequencies, cranked up their power to drown out rivals, and wandered across the dial. The Commerce Department, under Herbert Hoover, tried to referee by issuing licenses, but courts ruled that the old 1912 radio law did not give him the power to deny a license or to say where a station must sit on the dial. Listeners got whistles, howls and three preachers at once.

Here is the strange part. The industry itself begged for regulation. Established broadcasters wanted order, because chaos hurt the stations with the most invested. Congress answered with the Radio Act of 1927, which created a temporary Federal Radio Commission and introduced the licensing test that would outlive it: a license would be granted if it served the public interest, convenience or necessity. The words came from the world of utility and railroad regulation, where governments had long told private companies that a monopoly over a public good came with public duties attached.

The 1934 act took that structure, made it permanent, and broadened it. The FCC would have seven commissioners (the number was later cut to five). It would license stations for fixed terms, renew them or not, and police interference. And the act kept a principle that sounds almost quaint now: a license conferred no ownership. The statute said so in substance, providing for the use of channels but not their ownership, and requiring license holders to waive any claim to the frequency itself.

The trustee idea and why it was a compromise

It helps to see what Congress did not do. Several countries took radio fully public. Britain built the BBC as a public corporation funded by a license fee on receivers. Others put broadcasting under a government ministry. The United States went the other way: private companies would own the stations, sell the advertising and keep the profits. What the public got in return was a promise.

That is the bargain at the heart of the 1934 law. Commercial broadcasters received something enormously valuable for free: exclusive use of a slice of a scarce public resource, protected by federal law against anyone who tried to transmit on top of them. In exchange, they accepted that they were trustees. They had to operate in the public interest, and every few years they had to persuade the government that they had done so.

There was a fight over whether that was enough. During the debate in 1934, reformers allied with educational and religious broadcasters pushed an amendment, associated with Senators Robert Wagner and Henry Hatfield, that would have set aside a quarter of radio frequencies for nonprofit stations. The commercial networks opposed it, and it lost. Congress instead asked the new FCC to study the question, and the commission came back recommending against reserving channels. The decision shaped American broadcasting for a generation: commercial first, and public service as a condition of the license rather than a sector of its own.

I think this is the most useful thing to understand about the 1934 act. It was never a socialist law, and it was never a free-market law either. It was a deal. Its value depended entirely on whether the government would actually enforce its side.

What "public interest" meant when it had teeth

For a while, the phrase did real work. The FCC in its early decades wrote rules on the theory that it could shape the structure of the industry for the public's sake. The clearest example is the chain broadcasting rules, adopted around 1941, which pushed back against network control of local stations. NBC at the time ran two networks, known as the Red and the Blue. The commission's rules effectively forced NBC to sell one of them; the Blue network became the American Broadcasting Company. ABC, in other words, exists partly because a regulator decided that one company owning two national radio networks was bad for listeners.

NBC sued, and in 1943 the Supreme Court sided with the FCC in National Broadcasting Co. v. United States. Justice Felix Frankfurter's opinion reasoned that because radio frequencies are limited, the government could not simply act as a traffic cop; it could consider the composition of the traffic. That idea, called the scarcity rationale, became the legal foundation for treating broadcasters differently from newspapers. A newspaper publisher needs paper and ink. A broadcaster needs a frequency that, if handed to one person, cannot be handed to anyone else.

Other rules followed from the same logic. Section 315 of the act, carried over from the 1927 law, required a station that gave airtime to one candidate for office to give equal opportunities to that candidate's opponents. The FCC limited how many stations one company could own, nationally and in a single market. It expected stations to air local programming and to find out what their communities needed, through a formal process the commission called ascertainment. For decades it applied a policy, the Fairness Doctrine, that asked broadcasters to cover controversial issues and to air contrasting views. None of it made American radio and television high-minded, and plenty of it was enforced lazily. But the premise held: a license was a public trust, and the public could ask questions about how it was used.

How the bargain was hollowed out

The decline came in several waves, and it was bipartisan in a way that is worth being honest about.

The first wave was intellectual. By the 1960s and 1970s, economists and lawyers were arguing that the scarcity rationale was weak, because nearly everything is scarce, and the right answer to scarcity is a market. Spectrum, they said, should be sold like any other resource and its owners left alone. That argument has real force. Ronald Coase made a version of it in 1959, long before it was fashionable, and a later generation of regulators found it persuasive.

The second wave was political. In 1961 John Kennedy's FCC chairman, Newton Minow, told a room full of broadcasters that their schedules amounted to a "vast wasteland," and the phrase stuck because it was funny and accurate. But the speech is remembered precisely because it was unusual. Within two decades the tone at the commission had reversed. Under Ronald Reagan, FCC Chairman Mark Fowler described television as just another appliance, a toaster with pictures, and argued the public interest was simply whatever the public chose to watch. The commission dropped program logging requirements, ascertainment and limits on commercial minutes, and in 1987 it abandoned the Fairness Doctrine.

The third wave was legislative, and Democrats own a share of it. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed by Bill Clinton, eliminated the national cap on the number of radio stations one company could own and loosened other limits. A wave of mergers followed, and a handful of companies came to own many hundreds or thousands of stations each. The same law lengthened broadcast license terms to eight years and made renewal close to automatic, so long as a station had not committed serious violations. Three years before that, Congress had authorized the FCC to auction spectrum for new services such as mobile phones, which raised large sums and also quietly shifted the government's thinking about spectrum toward property.

By the end of the 1990s, the trustee idea was still in the statute but mostly absent from practice. A broadcast license had become, for most purposes, a valuable asset that its owner could expect to keep and to sell.

The case for letting it go, taken seriously

Before arguing for reviving the bargain, it is fair to lay out why many thoughtful people think it should rest in peace.

First, the scarcity argument really is weaker than it was. In 1943 a town might have had a handful of radio stations. Today a person with a phone can reach cable channels, streaming services, podcasts, newsletters and every newspaper on earth. If the justification for regulating broadcasters was that they controlled the only pipes, the pipes have multiplied.

Second, "the public interest" is a vague standard, and vague standards hand power to whoever runs the agency. Progressives tend to like that power when their side holds it and fear it when the other side does. That is not a hypothetical. In 2025 FCC Chairman Brendan Carr used the agency's authority in ways critics across the spectrum called intimidation of the press, including public remarks about late-night host Jimmy Kimmel shortly before ABC pulled his show off the air for several days in September 2025, and reopened complaints about network news coverage. A strong public-interest standard in the hands of an administration hostile to journalists is a weapon, not a shield.

Third, the old regime was never as noble in practice as its defenders remember. License renewals were rarely denied. The Fairness Doctrine was used by administrations of both parties to harass critics. Local programming rules were often satisfied with a few minutes of Sunday-morning public affairs nobody watched.

These points are right, and any honest progressive answer has to accept them. The answer is not to give a political appointee broader power to judge which news is fair. It is to recover the structural part of the bargain, which is about ownership, access and public alternatives rather than policing content.

What the 1934 idea still offers

Here is the argument, and it is an argument. The deepest insight of the Communications Act was not that bureaucrats should grade programming. It was that some resources are so central to public life that private parties may use them only on conditions, and that the conditions should concern the structure of the market. That insight travels well.

Ownership limits are the clearest case. When one company owns the local stations in dozens of markets, it can send the same scripted segment to anchors across the country, and local newsrooms shrink as stations are run for cash flow. Limiting consolidation is content-neutral; it says nothing about which views may be aired, only about how many voices exist. The FCC still has local ownership rules, and every few years the agency reviews them, often with an eye to loosening them. Those reviews are open for public comment, and they deserve more attention from people who care about local news than they get.

Public media is a second case. The United States eventually did what the 1934 reformers wanted, in a different form: the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which in turn helped support NPR and PBS member stations. For many rural communities, the local public station became the last full-time newsroom within a hundred miles. In 2025 Congress rescinded the federal money already approved for public broadcasting, and the corporation announced it would wind down. Many stations, especially small rural ones that leaned most on federal grants, were left looking for other funding. Whatever one thinks of particular programs, removing that support fell hardest on places with the fewest alternatives.

Spectrum itself is a third case. The airwaves are still public property, and the government still decides who uses them for broadcasting, mobile data, Wi-Fi and satellites. Unlicensed spectrum, the shared bands that make Wi-Fi possible, is a modern version of the 1934 idea: a commons that anyone can use under simple rules, rather than a lot sold to the highest bidder. When the FCC decides how much spectrum to leave open, it is deciding how much of the public's property stays public.

And finally, there is the question the 1934 Congress could not have asked: what do we owe one another on platforms that use no spectrum at all? Social networks and video sites reach more people than any broadcaster ever did, under no licensing regime and almost none of the old obligations. The answer probably is not to license them like radio stations. But the core question is the same one the law asked in 1934: when a private company becomes the main channel through which a country talks to itself, what conditions should come with that power?

Wins that came from both directions

It is worth remembering that the public-interest bargain was never purely a liberal project. Senator Clarence Dill of Washington, a Democrat, was a central author of the 1927 and 1934 laws, but they passed with broad support, and the ideas behind them came partly from Hoover, a Republican commerce secretary who called radio a public concern. Later, conservatives and progressives found common cause more than once. In 2003, when the FCC voted to loosen media ownership limits further, a striking coalition objected: liberal media reform groups, the National Rifle Association, religious broadcasters and many members of Congress from both parties. Congress responded by rolling back part of the change to the national television ownership cap. People who disagree about almost everything could agree that fewer owners meant fewer voices.

That coalition is the most hopeful thing in this history. Local news is not a red or blue good. A small-town paper or a public radio newsroom covers the school board, the county commission and the plant closure for everyone. When it disappears, everyone loses the same thing.

What you can do

The airwaves still belong to the public, and the public still has formal ways to say how they are used. A few concrete places to start:

• Weigh in when the FCC reopens ownership rules. The agency periodically proposes changes to how many stations one company may own and other broadcast rules, and those proposals go out for comment. Our open-comment tracker lists federal rules that are open for public comment right now, closing soonest first and grouped by issue, with guidance on writing a comment that a regulator can actually use.
• Ask your members of Congress where they stand on local news and public media. Look them up with the representatives finder: enter an address and you get your House member, both senators and your state legislators, with phone numbers, contact forms and their latest votes. A short call asking whether they support restoring public media funding, or limits on station consolidation, is the kind of thing staff record and count.
• Find and support local newsrooms and media advocacy groups. The organizations directory lists nonprofits by cause in every state. Public stations that lost federal grants rely on members, and a modest monthly gift matters most to the smallest ones.
• Keep reading the bigger fight. Our topic page on media and democracy gathers the latest coverage on press freedom, ownership and public broadcasting.

The 1934 Congress made a promise in the name of everyone who would ever turn on a radio. The promise was never kept as well as it should have been. It has not expired.