Stop blaming the networks for being extorted. The reason a sitting president can credibly threaten broadcasters with license loss isn’t that ABC’s predecessors cut a deal in 1927 — it’s that the United States has kept the same federal licensing system alive for 99 years on a fiction that technology demolished decades ago. And the deregulatory cure on offer in the Wall Street Journal would just lock in the four-conglomerate oligopoly that fiction built.
In ABC vs. Trump and the Broadcasters’ Free-Speech Sellout, Thomas W. Hazlett argues that ABC deserves little sympathy because broadcasters themselves drafted the 1927 Radio Act’s “public interest” language and have blocked every deregulation push since — including Rep. Lionel Van Deerlin’s 1978 rewrite and the McCain-Dole effort in 1996. Hazlett’s verdict: the network gets to enjoy the speech-suppression regime it spent a century defending.
Let me concede what Hazlett gets right, because conceding it is the only way to take the rest of it apart. Trump’s pressure on ABC is genuinely troubling. Threatening license reviews because the host of Jimmy Kimmel Live made you the butt of a joke is exactly the kind of petty state retaliation the First Amendment was written to prevent. Hazlett is also right that the 1927 Radio Act was drafted with the National Association of Broadcasters at the table, and that broadcasters subsequently killed the reforms that might have unwound the licensing regime.
What he does not get right is the diagnosis — and especially not the prescription. He is right that the NAB killed those reforms. He has the cause exactly backwards.
Start with the doctrinal premise Hazlett mentions in passing and then drops. Laurence Tribe called it “a profound fallacy about spectrum scarcity.” George Carlin turned it into a comedy bit. Spectrum scarcity is the legal fiction that justifies every license, every “public interest” condition, every FCC content review. It is also false. It was shaky in 1927, when radio waves had only just begun to be understood. By the 1960s, when cable and satellite began delivering video without scarcity, the premise was visibly collapsing. By 2026, when every phone, every home router, and every satellite constellation competes for the same airwaves, the premise is laughable. Tribe said it in the 1970s, before digital compression made hundreds of channels possible; the point is fairer now than it was then, though scarcity isn’t gone, it’s just different. The fix is to allocate more efficiently — through auctions, through dynamic sharing like the Citizens Broadband Radio Service the FCC has actually been rolling out — not to pretend scarcity doesn’t exist and hand the existing license-holders a permanent windfall.
A regime that licenses speech on a fictitious premise is a regime that licenses speech on no premise. The “public interest” clause was a workaround for a problem that did not exist. Workarounds do not become legitimate just because they last a century.
Hazlett wants you to blame the broadcasters for writing the 1927 compromise. So what? The First Amendment does not lose force because the regulated industry once cooperated with its own regulation. The free speech rights of 80 million ABC viewers in 2026 do not vanish because the National Association of Broadcasters agreed to a deal in 1927. That is guilt by ancestry, not by law. Hazlett substitutes a rhetorical trick for a constitutional argument.
His own historical examples make the case against him. He tells the story of Nixon’s FCC harassing the Washington Post in 1972 over two Florida TV stations to pressure the paper’s Watergate coverage. He quotes Nixon: “The Post is going to have damnable, damnable problems out of this one.” That story is supposed to demonstrate continuity with today’s Trump-era threats. It actually demonstrates something else: the “public interest” clause is a weapon any administration can pick up. It does not matter whether the broadcasters lobbied for it or against it. It matters that the weapon exists.
Hazlett knows this. He quotes Nixon’s FCC chairman Dean Burch on “regulation by raised eyebrow.” He describes how Chuck Colson’s threats worked precisely because no explicit license challenge was needed. The harm lives in the regime, not in any single industry’s choices.
There is also a quieter sleight of hand. Hazlett lists every time the broadcasters blocked deregulation — 1978, 1996 — and presents this as evidence of broadcaster guilt. But the missing party is Congress. The FCC could have reclassified broadcast spectrum as property rights decades ago. Congress could have updated the 1927 Act at any point. Neither did. The reason broadcasters remain uniquely vulnerable to license-based political pressure is not that they failed to lobby hard enough for reform. It is that the political coalition for reform never exists against any incumbent-protected regulatory bargain. Hazlett treats industry self-interest as the cause. It is the consequence.
Now look at what his prescription would actually do. Strip out the public-interest obligation. Keep the giveaway. You get the worst of both worlds: concentrated ownership with no public accountability, ever.
Four conglomerates — Disney, Comcast, Paramount, and Fox — own the major broadcast networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox), and a handful of station-group owners like Nexstar and Sinclair control most of the local affiliates. They have consolidated over the last thirty years, largely because the FCC relaxed its ownership caps and because the licenses themselves trade at oligopoly prices. That is not a free market. That is a state-created cartel with the public-interest strings cut. Hazlett’s column calls the 1996 broadcasters’ victory a tragedy; in 2009 those same broadcasters got digital licenses essentially for free. The giveaway isn’t a one-time historical quirk — it’s the ongoing regime Hazlett’s prescription would entrench, minus only the public-interest strings.
What would actually fix this? Three things, all of which Hazlett’s prescription would preclude.
First, keep the public-interest obligation and strengthen it. Local news, children’s programming, equal time for federal candidates during election season — these are not censorship. They are the price the public charges for letting private companies use a public resource worth billions for free. If broadcasters hate the strings, they can pay for the spectrum like every other business does.
Second, cap ownership again. Four conglomerates should not decide what 330 million Americans see on broadcast TV. The FCC’s ownership limits existed for a reason. Restore them.
Third, fund alternatives that do not depend on the conglomerate model. Public broadcasting gets starved because the political class finds it convenient. A real public-media endowment — funded, say, by auctioning spectrum to broadcasters at market prices instead of giving it away — could do what the BBC attempts: produce news and culture that serves the public instead of shareholders. The rural electric cooperatives brought electricity to places the investor-owned utilities refused to serve. The same principle works for broadcasting: where the market fails to provide what communities need, member-owned stations can.
Hazlett’s column ends with a wish: “May free speech soon, finally, be yours.” That wish comes true only when the cage is dismantled — and the oligopoly it produced is broken up at the same time. Until then, every broadcaster, every station, and every viewer remains a hostage to whoever happens to occupy the FCC. Anyway.