2
private power in the then new medium of broadcasting saw Congress embed within the mandate
of the Federal Communications Commission, broadcasting’s new regulatory body, a general
command to preserve competition in commerce in the broadcast medium and a specific directive
to refuse a station license to any person adjudged guilty “of unlawfully monopolizing or
attempting unlawfully to monopolize, radio communication.” Congressional fear of radio’s
potentially dangerous concentration of political power in part underlay the Act’s prohibition
against any joint ownership of radio and wired systems.
2
In the period immediately following the Second World War, the Commission on Freedom of
the Press, probably the most important study of mass media in the United States (conducted by a
distinguished group of intellectuals under the leadership of the famed educator, Robert Maynard
Hutchins), rearticulated these concerns. Seeing in the ownership patterns of the post-war media
system a distinct danger of concentration, the Hutchins Commission worried that such
concentration undermined the press’ crucial roles as conveyer of information, government
watchdog, and educator. But while the Commission’s members generally shared the concern
over ownership concentration, they disagreed among themselves regarding the proper remedy,
especially about the wisdom of government intervention that went beyond conventional
regulatory and antitrust policies.
3
The compromise – advocacy of an ethic of professionalism and
responsibility among journalists – laid the foundation for the “social responsibility” theory of the
2
Public L. – No. 416 – 73
rd
Congress; S. 3285, Secs. 314, 311.
3
Commission on Freedom of the Press, A Free and Responsible Press, A General Report on Mass
Communication: Newspapers, Radio, Motion Pictures, Magazines, and Books, (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1947).
Convention