The Power To Regulate Is The Power To Control
Established in June 1934, early in FDR’s first term as POTUS, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) licensed radio spectrum a mere six months at a time. That gave it the power to harass radio stations that criticized the New Deal, or FDR himself. The FCC soon developed a reputation for denying licenses or causing major paperwork headaches for radio stations daft enough to question the New Deal Order or the administration’s official narratives.
One particularly stunning example of government censorship via corporate proxy occurred in February 1934, when the nation’s radio spectrum was still under the control of the FCC’s bureaucratic precursor, the Federal Radio Commission. Like more recent censorship-by-proxy, it led to death and destruction.
Eager to further his version of a Great Reset, FDR announced that contracts with private airlines to deliver the public mails were abrogated (as gold clauses in bonds had been) and the routes turned over to the US Army Air Corps. Unfortunately, the military’s pilots back then were far from being candidates for Top Gun school. As predicted, they began crashing. Soon, a dozen had died, along with many of the messages they had been entrusted to carry.
To hide his failed policy, FDR censored veteran pilot Eddie Rickenbacker, who took to the airwaves to bring public attention to the matter. NBC Radio’s William B. Miller warned Eddie that if he said anything controversial on air, he would be pulled off, on orders from Washington. Instead of criticizing FDR as intended, Eddie dissembled.
The Twitter Files saga proves that the US federal government is still using its regulatory powers to coerce corporations into censoring critics, despite the fact that doing so is patently unconstitutional. As the US Supreme Court ruled in 1960 in Bates v. City of Little Rock (361 US 516), First Amendment rights “are protected not only against heavy-handed frontal attack, but also from being stifled by more subtle governmental interference.”
And here in Canada in 2023 the federal government will be instructing the CRTC to regulate social media.
A similar process has been employed by the federal government in Canada.
Since the CRTC was created in 1968, it has used its extensive powers to ensure that all radio, TV, cable and satellite TV companies adhere to what the CRTC has deemed to be the politically correct narrative. Each of these companies was issued a licence by the CRTC, which has to be renewed on a regular basis, such as every 5 to 7 years. A renewal is a costly, time-consuming and public process where anyone that has a grievance against the company is free to have their say. For example, if the gay community is upset with how a TV broadcaster portrays gays, it can make its views known to the company and the CRTC. The CRTC then would order the broadcaster to “correct” its behaviour.
The CRTC holds the power of life or death over each of the companies to which it issues a licence. A licensed company would cease to exist if the CRTC revoked its licence, which the CRTC has the power to do. Not surprisingly then, each licensed company has quickly learned to obey the dictates of the CRTC.
Before the CRTC was created the fuhrer of broadcasting in Canada was none other than CBC. CBC issued the license to CTV.
Which is why the CRTC must cease to exist and why independent media is so important.
It should be no surprise that Wikipedia is stone-cold silent about the entire episode. But then, Wiki gives fawning treatment to notorious racist Woodrow Wilson and his inept handling of US demobilization after WW1. So what do they know?
“The Power To Regulate Is The Power To Control”
I shudder to think that there exist(ed) people who didn’t know this.
Well, at least Kate has figured it out, not bad for a broad.
We need the DE-regulating POTUS … Donald J Trump in office again
https://www.reginfo.gov/public/pdf/eo13771/EO_13771_Final_Accounting_for_Fiscal_Year_2020.pdf
Regulatory REPEAL is what TRUE conservative President’s do. And NONE … not even Saint Ronald Reagan did it as well as PDJT.
While the Katyn Massacre is widely known today, less known is U.S. government officials’ and the radio industry’s domestic suppression of the event, the details of which we know from a series of congressional hearings, including the famous Madden Committee hearings, released in 1952. The news in spring 1943 had domestic implications in the U.S. The Katyn discovery’s effect on Polish-Americans was, in the words of President Franklin Roosevelt’s closest adviser, Harry Hopkins, “political dynamite” for the 1944 U.S. elections.
…
Two influential Polish-language radio stations in Detroit, which even today has one of the largest Polish-American populations, were suggesting Soviet guilt in spring 1943 based on Polish news sources. After a local OWI official notified the FCC of the Detroit broadcasts, an FCC official privately encouraged the Censorship Office to censor the Katyn broadcasts domestically. The Censorship Office, however, refused. The Katyn controversy was not, in the office’s eyes, a national security matter. Opinions about Soviet or Nazi guilt regarding Katyn, and the effect on the president’s post-war plans with Congress, were a matter of domestic debate—Hopkins’ “political dynamite”—not national security.
After the Censorship Office’s refusal to intervene, a handful of officials from the FCC and OWI immediately decided more must be done to suppress the news. They ordered a meeting with two members of the private-sector radio censorship committee—one of the Censorship Office’s “innovations”—in early May 1943 to discuss the growing Polish-Russian controversy. The conversation was unrecorded, but after that meeting the two members of the private-sector censorship committee sent a memo to radio stations strongly discouraging news coverage of the executions, except from government-approved news sources.
https://www.discoursemagazine.com/ideas/2023/01/19/censored/
The power to lie to millions.