The Radio Right and The Fairness Doctrine
2021-02-14 · Guest: — · 51:55
Bob Zadek interviews historian Paul Matzko about his book The Radio Right, exploring how the Kennedy and Johnson administrations weaponized the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine to silence conservative broadcasters. They discuss the historical origins of broadcast licensing, the “public interest” standard, and the parallels between mid-century radio regulation and modern attempts to control speech on the internet.
Topics: Fairness Doctrine, First Amendment, FCC, JFK, Conservative Radio, Censorship, Section 230, Media History
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Paul Matzko
Introduction: Beware of “Fair” [00:17]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio. The show this Sunday and always, the show of ideas, never once the show of attitude. Thank you so much for listening on this Valentine’s Day Sunday morning.
I guess the theme for this morning’s show will be “Beware of Fair.” “Fair” is, in general, a scary word—a word by which those in holding political power hide. “Fair” is a safe place for politicians to hide and to bury the most unfair of laws, the most unfair of policies. If you can somehow dress it up in “fair,” you can sneak it by us, the unwitting public. And that, you will hear this morning, is the subtext of our show.
There’s been so much in the news lately about censorship, Section 230—we have had many shows on that topic—attempts to censor the internet. There has been quite a brouhaha about Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites censoring or not, depending upon who you believe. There is the whole issue of censorship in general, juxtaposed against the very First Amendment to the Constitution in the Bill of Rights, which among other sacred rights ensures us the right—very broad rights, the broadest in the entire world—the rights to express our point of view, the rights of, in general, free speech.
I have always been interested and curious about this issue, its history and its future. And along comes this morning’s guest, who writes about the most readable history/political book I have ever come across. The title of the book kind of tells a lot of it. It’s entitled The Radio Right. Subtext: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement.
The author is Paul Matzko. Paul has written this book. Paul is a historian, a graduate of Penn State, has a PhD in history, is a passionate student of recent American history, and also is a contributor to Libertarianism.org, sponsored by Cato. Paul tells a wonderful story going back to the early days of radio. We’re going to touch on that topic, up and centers on JFK, who was of course president from 1960 to 1963. And he wrote his book Profiles in Courage. You will learn from this morning’s show that a lot of the characters we discuss in Paul’s book can be in a sequel called Profiles in Cowardice, including perhaps JFK himself. So Paul, welcome to the show this morning and I want to be sure I say this more than once: thank you so much for your book.
JFK and the Rise of the Radio Right [04:58]
Bob Zadek: Now Paul, you tell the story of a band of conservatives who in effect recaptured what was then a dying medium: AM radio. Your story really starts back in 1927 or thereabouts, but we’re going to join the story in the more contemporary place, which is the Kennedy administration. So let’s start with the Kennedy administration. What does the Kennedy administration have to do with the birth of conservative radio?
Paul Matzko: Well Bob, it’s a delight to be with you on the show. And what Kennedy is concerned about—the overriding priority of every first-term president is becoming a second-term president. So he wins narrowly in 1960 and he is concerned about this new phenomenon, this right-wing radio surge, really, which was made possible in the 1950s as the big networks—the radio networks, CBS, NBC and the like—they’re shifting their attention to television. Radio’s the past. Radio’s dying. You’ve heard that before; you’ve heard it for a long, long time, and it’s never actually true.
But radio becomes more independent, more local station owners who own just one or two stations are popping up. They’re desperate for programming and they’re willing to air points of view that previously were considered too radical for the airwaves, both on the left and right. And that included this generation of conservative broadcasters. And they used the airwaves to attack the Kennedy administration. They had hundreds of stations that aired their programs by the early 60s. The largest of them, Carl McIntire, had 20 million weekly listeners, which is as large as Rush Limbaugh some 40 years later. And they criticized the Kennedy administration and its policies.
And so Kennedy wants to find a way, some sort of mechanism by which to take them down a notch in preparation for his reelection campaign. What he seizes on—well, there’s two components. He uses the IRS, the Internal Revenue Service, to audit the heck out of these right-wing broadcasters and try to remove their tax exemption. But he also uses the Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine. If you can force them to be “fair,” as he says to his FCC chairman nominee in 1963, he says, “It is important that stations be kept fair.” Of course, what he means is fair to me. So he targets the Fairness Doctrine against stations that air conservative programming, forces them to either be a lot nicer to the administration than they are being—it’s good for his hopes of reelection, it’s good for his legislative agenda—and that’s what he does.
The Fiction of Scarcity and the Licensing Regime [07:11]
Bob Zadek: Now Paul, let’s put this into a bit of a broader context. So we have the 1960s, television is the new greatest medium media outlet, AM radio is dying except for Casey Kasem and the Top 40 and rock and roll music. So AM radio is kind of on the wane in its battle for the attention from an influence-manipulating standpoint. AM radio is on the decline. And in that context, as big business goes into television, they lose interest in AM radio. And now AM radio becomes entrepreneurial, which is kind of interesting itself. Here we have, as big business goes into television, they lose interest in AM radio, and now AM radio becomes entrepreneurial. And in its typical entrepreneurial determination to survive—that’s what entrepreneurs do—they got the leftovers. And the leftovers were, among other things, right-wing—not necessarily extreme, but a lot of that—right-wing opinion radio was leftover. It was not on television. Television was kind of WASP-ish, if you will, very Middle America, very mainstream, Walter Cronkite-ish. And so AM radio was left to what did not migrate to television.
And in that context, you mentioned Paul, the FCC. Now, the FCC, I’m going to flash back a bit to put this in context. When radio was created and starting to be regulated, it was licensed. Now, we take that for granted that broadcast is licensed. But just imagine if newspapers had to apply for a license. The word “license,” of course, is one of the more despicable words in government, because it means you need permission to do something. Oh, how I hate that phrase. So imagine if newspapers or magazines needed permission they had to apply for to operate. Well, radio had to apply for permission. Now, that was because of a fiction, a misunderstanding of the laws of physics and electrodynamics. So tell us how we got to a point back in 1927 when there was justification for the licensing of radio, but not, of course, licensing for print media. How did that come about? Was it arbitrary or something else?
Paul Matzko: So it was deeply arbitrary, but it was rooted in the politics of the time. It’s the 1920s, at the time the Secretary of Commerce, which is kind of given oversight of the airwaves—what limited oversight at the time was allowed—was Herbert Hoover. And Hoover says, “Hey, we don’t want a truly free market in radio. This is bad and encourages folks who I don’t like.” And his politics are relatively progressive. He’s a Republican, but a progressive Republican. He doesn’t like folks who are outside of the political mainstream, whether that is immigrants owning radio stations, even broadcasting in languages other than English. He doesn’t like Catholic-owned radio stations because at the time anti-Catholic prejudice is very intense in America. He doesn’t like groups that are outside of the kind of mainstream of American society owning radio stations and saying whatever they like on the airwaves.
And so there is pressure to use a licensing system to make sure that only people broadcasting are those who broadcast in—and here’s the technical phrase, the legal phrase—“the public interest, convenience, or necessity.” Which raises the question: who gets to decide what is necessary for the public? Well, it’s not actually going to be the public. It’s going to be a handful of lawyers at this new federal, at the time called Federal Radio Commission, but eventually renamed the Federal Communications Commission. So it’s a way of controlling dissident speech, controlling speech by people who aren’t White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. It’s a way of asserting government control over a very vibrant, innovative space. If you actually know about radio before the FCC system, it is this fascinating, culturally diverse space where lots of experimentation and innovation is happening. And it becomes, after the FCC creates a licensing regime, it becomes more corporate, more centralized, more mainstream, more moderate, more boring, whiter, more native, etc. It becomes a much less interesting space as a result of the FCC.
And their licensing regime was justified. They said, “Hey look, there’s a technical limit to the number of radio stations. There’s a scarcity in the total number of radio stations that can be licensed. Therefore, someone has to choose who gets that limited slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, and it should be the government that decides that.” Now, this was an ex post facto justification. It was an argument they made in court. It was never actually codified in law. It’s a court argument made after the fact, and it is balderdash. And we know that because the FCC has never actually met the technical maximum number of stations possible. Not then, not now. In fact, one of the first things the FCC did was try to shrink the number of stations that were licensed to the benefit of, again, big corporations, the nascent radio networks. So it was all poppycock and a way of asserting government control.
Radio vs. The Internet: A Historical Parallel [13:16]
Bob Zadek: Let me just put this in an interesting context. See if I’m right, Paul. You describe the radio where small and not-so-small and large stations were springing up. A lot of them operated as very small business activities, small markets, very diverse points of view and unregulated. And then along comes the FCC, and it, after it gets enabling legislation, it starts to control through licensing who can be a broadcaster. What I immediately jumped to when I learned of this history from your book, I immediately jumped to: my goodness, that describes the internet. Unlicensed, uncontrolled, anybody with a PC can now be a broadcaster, if you will, on the internet and present a point of view. Nobody can stop them, except in authoritarian governments such as China, North Korea, et al. But in general, cannot be stopped, cannot be suppressed, no need for a license, incredibly small barriers of entry. And we, the receiving public, get exposed to a range of points of view we couldn’t have imagined a couple of decades ago. Is that a fair parallel? Radio pre-FCC and internet before governments start to, which they’re starting to now, exercise some censorship and other forms of control? Is that a fair parallel or is it a stretch?
Paul Matzko: Absolutely, Bob. I think it’s a great parallel. In fact, the timeline’s not so different. Early radio stations start to coalesce early in the 1910s and of course breaks out real big in the 1920s. And it’s not until ‘27 and then ‘34 that the FCC bulks up and becomes a phenomenon. So that’s a span of, you know, 15 years, give or take. Well, take the distance between the kind of growth of the internet, especially in the 90s, consumer internet here, World Wide Web, to today. It’s a little bit more than that, but not so much more than that. 25 years versus 15 years. So there’s a kind of a similar span. And in that regard, we are seeing this—we are looking at possibly a 1927-type situation where the government seeks to take a new media form that is born free, born unregulated, and clamp down on it. Find ways of controlling it in ways that will discourage, I think, free expression, that will make the internet, like radio, less interesting, less weird, and more mainstream and so on.
So that’s a very fair comparison. And I would also note that one of the oddities of this time period is that when we say free speech or the First Amendment, as you introduced this segment, we often think of free speech as it applies to print, to newspapers. And the fact—so it feels weird to us, the proposition that the government would license newspapers. Well, that’s a bit of an American oddity. I mean, if you go back in early modern history, it was ordinary for governments in Europe, say, to license newspapers. So in America, we reacted against that. We created a very high bar that the government has to clear to shut down on someone’s free speech rights in print. And those protections were being enhanced and strengthened in the 20th century through a variety of court cases. At the same time, though, because of this whole scarcity principle excuse, broadcasting was not given full First Amendment protection. And so the government could decide whether or not you could own a radio station on the basis of whether your speech was appealing to those with power, whether or not your speech was in the, air quotes here, “public interest,” whether it was fair, whether it was equitable, and so on. And so we created a system by which we have a two-track system. In print, the First Amendment is a very high bar to clear. It’s getting stronger over time. It is somewhat unique in world history, the extent to which we have a high First Amendment bar in print. But in broadcasting, it’s a very low bar. The government is able to tell you to say who can speak and what they’re allowed to speak. And we have this two-track system. There’s a First Amendment in print, but not a true First Amendment in broadcasting.
The Fairness Doctrine and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty [17:59]
Bob Zadek: Now, the governing principle, as you recited a few moments ago, was public interest, convenience, and necessity. I might have had that in wrong order, but public convenience, necessity, and public interest. Now, public interest. “Public”—kind of a broad term. And one can ask rhetorically, well, which segment of the public? And the answer is government’s answer is, well, we’ll get back to you on that. And public interest always means the interest of the human being then in power. So public interest is the opposite of public. It’s one person or one tiny group. That’s whose interest is regulated by statutes that empower the government to protect, quote, “the public interest.” And to my friends out there, as you learn to fear the word “fair,” also “public interest” is, to borrow from a James Bond movie, is a license to prohibit. It’s the power to destroy, power to control. So public interest—learn it is a scary word.
Okay, so now fast forward back to JFK. JFK, who is of course, as most politicians are, ambitious, looking forward to a second term. And I believe this all comes to a head when JFK takes an initiative that he’s very enthusiastic about involving a nuclear test ban treaty of sorts. So tell us about the nuclear test ban treaty and how that fits into the story you tell in your book.
Paul Matzko: So those of you listeners who are old enough to remember, JFK comes out of the gate stumbling as administration with the Bay of Pigs scandal. It’s just a bit of a black eye. Is it really his fault? That’s a question. But it looks bad. He’s this big foreign policy stumble out the gate. So he is concerned for reelection that if his big foreign policy accomplishment is the Bay of Pigs, well, that’s not going to help with the voters. So he wants some tentpole foreign policy accomplishment that he can pin his reelection hopes on. And that is going to be an atmospheric nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union. It’s the middle of the Cold War, and up until this point, both sides had been detonating bombs above ground, which spreads radiation all over. It’s a bad idea. So it’s actually not a bad concept to attempt to stop that. And he’s going to make this the tentpole. But to get that through, to get that approved, you need a supermajority in the Senate. You need a two-thirds Senate confirmation. And so that’s a high bar to clear, even with Democratic control of Congress at the time.
And there is significant pushback against this bill. Think of the conservative opposition to Barack Obama’s deal with Iran, the attempt to slow their nuclear weapons acquisition. All those same criticisms were being offered by conservatives in the 60s against JFK’s proposed nuclear test ban treaty. And it’s working. Congressmen are reporting that the constituent mail coming into their offices is skewing like 10 to 1 anti-treaty. And they blame right-wing radio. These hosts, they’re attacking it on the airwaves day after day after day, and it’s working. That spooked the Kennedy administration. And so they say, “What can we do to shut down the source of this opposition?” Well, there’s this thing called the Fairness Doctrine. It’s never really been enforced. It’s been on the books since 1949, but it’s been a period of salutary neglect. They haven’t enforced it. What if we enforce it, but only in a targeted way? If every time a radio station airs a broadcaster who criticizes the nuclear test ban treaty, if we make some sort of appeal to the Fairness Doctrine to force that radio station to air something in favor of the treaty, that will take the wind out of their sails.
Weaponizing Fairness: The Economic Chill [22:21]
Bob Zadek: Paul, tell our friends what the Fairness Doctrine is. It’s very simple. Just explain it so they have a context.
Paul Matzko: Yeah, so the Fairness Doctrine, it’s real basic. What it says is that if a radio station—the owner of the radio station—allows some sort of editorializing, like someone not just reporting the facts, but giving an opinion on those facts—so saying not just that there’s a nuclear test ban treaty being proposed in Congress, but saying that’s a good or bad thing. That’s called editorializing. If a radio station allows editorializing, and they should, according to the FCC, they have to make sure they represent both, if you will, the blunt, both major points of view, for and against the treaty. They cannot just editorialize their own opinion alone. So in theory, it’s meant to promote fair and balanced discussion of current events and political issues. But if you target that, what Kennedy realizes is, if we only go after unbalanced expression of conservative speech and never go after unbalanced expression of, say, liberal speech, you can weaponize this rule. It’s all about enforcement. How do you enforce this? Can you extract a partisan advantage?
And so what the Fairness Doctrine allows you to do—it hinges on citizen complaints. So you need someone who listens to the radio station and says, “Hey, wait a second, they attacked the nuclear test ban treaty and I support it. I don’t like that, and they didn’t air something that represented my point of view. I’m going to go to the FCC, file a complaint.” And next time that radio station’s license comes up for renewal—usually every two years—that complaint will be taken into account. They might not get their license renewed, which is the kiss of death for a radio station. And so it’s a way of placing pressure on stations to air both sides of opinion. What Kennedy very cleverly does is—and illicitly does—is he creates a front organization, a fake organization called the Citizens Committee for a Nuclear Test Ban, which is funded by and actually created in the Oval Office itself. But no one knows that. And it’s a faux public grassroots organization that can file complaints on behalf of the administration against radio stations that are allowing attacks on the treaty. So it’s a brilliantly underhanded plan to help take the sails out of opposition to the treaty.
Bob Zadek: And what is the economic effect? Of course, this was very potent. What was the economic effect on the small entrepreneurial, somewhat conservative and sometimes very conservative stations? How effective was the use of the Fairness Doctrine? It was a lot more than just a citizen’s complaint. Tell us how it hit their bottom line.
Paul Matzko: Yeah, so the key thing to realize about radio in this period is that it goes from the people making decisions about programming in the 40s were like a CBS network executive in New York City. But in this period, it’s probably the guy who owns the local car dealership. He bought a station to promote his lot. There’s a big gap in terms of money, in terms of location, in terms of power. And if he—what the FCC Fairness Doctrine complaint system requires is they pass an additional rule in addition to the Fairness Doctrine called the Cullman Doctrine, which says if someone says that you did not represent their point of view among these issues, say on the treaty, you have to air their response for free, without charge. Well, that means anytime someone—one of your broadcasters, one of your programs—airs something controversial that gets some sort of response, you’re only getting paid once for having to give away two airtime slots. It doesn’t pay, right? You’re losing money every time someone says something controversial versus when they say something non-controversial where there is no room for a Fairness Doctrine complaint. So these small—and again, these are stations running on shoestring budgets, they’re just some local small businessman, they’re not some big corporation or network executive—they start avoiding controversial content because it doesn’t pay. Period. Left-wing, right-wing, none of this controversial stuff is going to be aired because it means getting double-billed for a single payment. And it has a huge chilling effect.
And it’s very effective. There’s actually an internal document from a Democratic National Committee-sponsored operative team which is using the Fairness Doctrine to gin up support for Lyndon Johnson’s campaign that year and to hurt Barry Goldwater’s campaign. And they report back to the boss after the ‘64 election, which was a landslide for LBJ, they report back to the DNC chair and say, “Hey look, this was valuable not just because we extracted thousands of hours of free pro-Johnson airtime, but also because it significantly diminished the ability of these right-wing hosts to find stations willing to air them.” And by the end of the decade, after years of this Fairness Doctrine system being in place, right-wing radio is a shell of itself. All of the major broadcasters had lost a majority of their radio stations willing to air them. It just doesn’t pay. So the effect is immense and it’s devastating.
Election Interference and the Nixon Backfire [28:12]
Bob Zadek: Two thoughts occurred to me, Paul. Number one, it was only seemed like weeks ago that we were all concerned—well, many people were concerned about alleged Russian interference in our election system by manipulating news and fake news. We all remember all of that. What occurred to me from that story in your book is that election interference goes back to Kennedy and Johnson in the 60s, only there the group interfering with free election was government itself. They were interfering in the electoral process. They were denying voters access to an opinion because the opinion was adverse. It was, in my mind—maybe I’m making too much of a leap—the same thing. Only not Russian interference, but White House interference with the election. So the outrage was kind of faux outrage. We have often had our own government interfering with our election.
Now, so the Fairness Doctrine, it had its heyday as a valuable tool during the Kennedy-Johnson era. And then, but it’s not around today. Where did the Fairness Doctrine go? Did somebody repeal it? What happened to the Fairness Doctrine?
Paul Matzko: Well, pretty quickly, the original wielders of this weaponized Fairness Doctrine—Democrats in this case in the early 60s—they realized, “Hey, if we get to exercise this power when we’re in control, the other side gets to exercise this power when they’re in control.” And so everything started looking a little bit different once Richard Nixon takes office. And what Nixon does is he uses the threat of Fairness Doctrine control to go after media outlets that are critical of his administration and his policies. So the shoe is now on the other foot, and they don’t like how it fits. Nixon uses the threat of Fairness Doctrine—some sort of Fairness Doctrine or other FCC regulatory rules to intimidate big television networks into changing their coverage of the Vietnam War. They’re criticizing his conduct of the Vietnam War, he doesn’t like it, he sends Chuck Colson, one of his CREEP (Committee to Re-elect the President) operatives, and they are, as Colson reports back, “cordial, accommodating, and almost apologetic” as soon as he brings out the implicit threat of Fairness Doctrine enforcement. And it works.
So once Nixon starts using the Fairness Doctrine as a weapon, everyone who was using it on the other side previously earlier in the decade starts to say, “Oh wait, this might not be such a great idea.” In fact, some of the historical documents that I rely on in my book exist because the people involved realized, “Oh, whoops, like this might be a mistake if both sides get to use this weaponized tool.” And so there’s a kind of a backing away from that position, but the rule—once it’s in place, it’s in place. It’s on the books. And so it continues to be used through the Nixon administration into the Ford administration. But Jimmy Carter comes along, and Jimmy Carter is the true great deregulator. He deregulates everything from airline tickets and flight routes to craft beer and deregulates the airwaves in significant ways. So the Carter FCC decides to stop enforcing as rigorously the Fairness Doctrine. And so it starts to wane in the late 70s.
And then Ronald Reagan in 1987 decides to actually repeal the Fairness Doctrine and then vetoes a congressional attempt—a bipartisan congressional attempt—to resurrect, to codify the Fairness Doctrine. He vetoes it and that’s the end in ‘87. This is notable because Reagan was himself a radio guy. People remember him for TV, for the General Electric Theater, for his B-movie Western appearances. But Reagan crucially in the 70s, when he was given the choice—he runs for president in ‘76 and loses, he had been governor of California earlier in the decade—he’s given his choice of what he wants to do while he’s waiting to run once again in 1980 when obviously he wins. And he’s given the choice of an ambassadorship to the United Kingdom, he’s given the choice of the chair of the Republican National Committee, he’s given his pick of all these plum assignments. He’s even given a choice of a prime-time slot on television. He turns all that down for radio, and he hosts a daily radio show that he mostly writes himself five days a week for a few years there between ‘76 and 1980. So he gets the power of AM radio. He understands how it’s a key way of building grassroots political support. And so I think that’s his own experience, and that’s why I think he repealed the Fairness Doctrine in ‘87, is that he gets that this is a tool for suppressing the politics of people like himself.
The Rush Limbaugh Era and Modern Echoes [33:37]
Bob Zadek: And then as a result of that, is there a direct line to the—I’ll just invent a phrase because it’s useful—the Rush Limbaugh area, or the Rush Limbaugh period, when conservative talk radio has its most influential period? Is there a direct line from the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine?
Paul Matzko: Yeah, so Rush will say this himself. I mean, he talks about the Fairness Doctrine a lot. I actually once went and counted in his online transcript system; he mentioned the Fairness Doctrine in 150 episodes since 2003. And when he tells the story of his own career, he started in the late 60s as a teenager. He was assigned to a radio station to do “community ascertainment,” which is a fancy term for making sure that your radio station complies with the various public interest obligations from the FCC, including the Fairness Doctrine. So Rush’s career actually began as just a teenager intern-type low-level employee trying to make sure that stations complied with the Fairness Doctrine. He saw that period up close and personal. And when he tells the story of why his station was able to take off in the late 80s and 90s, he’ll point to the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine as a key player.
And I think what folks need to realize is that talk radio—and the idea that talk radio is conservative is a bit of an accident of history, which we can talk about later—back in the 80s talk radio was actually much very politically diverse, both left and right. But talk radio can only exist in a Fairness Doctrine-free environment. Your radio show, Bob, can only exist in an environment where there is no rigorous enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine. Imagine if every time everything I just said in this interview today, if you had an obligation in your next show to air a somewhat equivalent amount of speech arguing the opposite. If every time you aired any kind of criticism of the government, you had to put a pro-government voice on. Any kind of position on a piece of legislation, you had to put someone in favor of the legislation on. It would be very, very hard to have this kind of current events political talk show. And so that is the key. I mean, you cannot have right-wing talk radio in the 80s and 90s in a Fairness Doctrine regime. So yeah, it’s absolutely the key to that moment. And it’s also why if you talk to talk radio people about the Fairness Doctrine, they’ll generally react with horror at the idea that you would want to resurrect this regime in any mass media form, let alone to the internet, because they remember what it was like in the bad old days. But if you talk to a younger generation of politicians and of political activists, they don’t remember that. And so there’s a real kind of generational and mass media form divide between what the Fairness Doctrine connotes to the listener.
The “Public Interest” Trap and Modern Mandates [36:48]
Bob Zadek: When you were speaking, I was making a few notes here. And one comment you made I want to go back to. In pointing out Rush Limbaugh’s early experience and his first employment, you said among other chores he had at a local radio station—I believe it was in Sacramento, but I could be wrong about that—but in any event, you said, you told us that Rush Limbaugh’s job among others was to make sure the station was operating—and the phrase you used according to my notes was—“in the public interest.” And that kind of—wow, I said to myself. Here we have a private for-profit business that will be denied its right to operate unless it operates in the public interest. Now, there’s nothing special about a radio station. It is a business, like operating a retail store. And imagine if every privately operated business had to prove to the government they were operating in the public interest, which means in the government’s interest, or else they would be denied the right to operate. It doesn’t seem like that belongs in a free enterprise system. And the whole fact that broadcast media was somehow for some fake reason going back to 1927 because there were allegedly limited bandwidth available, that therefore that was scarce and the government had to ration it in accordance with those people who furthered governmental ends, is abhorrent to me. To say the broadband is limited—that’s like saying there is a limited number of grains of sand. That’s kind of true, but that doesn’t mean we’re likely to run out anytime soon. And it’s not—it is limited, but it’s limited by a huge number that you pointed out we’ve never come close to exhausting. So the whole 1927 premise is fake. And because of that, a for-profit business operating in America has to get governmental permission and it has to prove it operates in the public interest, which means in the governmental interest. That’s—it leaped off my notes when I wrote it down. It’s astonishing to me.
Paul Matzko: Yeah, and it’s equally farcical. I mean, you can do a thought exercise and see how farcical this all is. I mean, there is technically a limited amount of capital in an economy. There’s only so many dollars to go around. Therefore, there’s only so many companies that can use those dollars, that can vacuum up those dollars and turn it into products and research and development and the like. Imagine someone saying the government should be allowed to decide which companies exist or don’t exist because there is technically a finite amount of capital, therefore the government should be able to determine which companies get that capital and which don’t. You’d say, “Whoa, whoa, wait a second. That’s a command economy.” Well, that’s what we did with this one segment of private businesses, with radio stations. And there’s something very pre-modern about this. I kind of referenced this before, this idea of licensing media outlets that was once normal in pre-modern Europe, to license newspapers. Only government-approved newspapers were allowed to be printed. That was once normal and we rejected that early on in the American experiment. But we applied this pre-modern concept of licensing outlets to radio.
But there’s something else pre-modern about what you just said, Bob, which is technically what the corporate charter—this charter system—all corporations are chartered by the government, even today. Now today, it’s a formality. You just go and file your corporate papers and the government gives you a little thing. It’s all very much just a tick some boxes and show that you, you know, qualify, etc. But once upon a time, that was a crucial system of control that the parliament or the legislature, sometimes even the crown, would charter corporations. And the corporation had to come to them and say, “Here’s why we’re justified to have this corporate charter.” And that was a very important tool of control. The government would use it to only charter corporations that benefited the crown or benefited the state. You think of the East India Company and the British Empire in India. So there is—the idea of corporate charters is like licensing in that in the pre-modern period it was a tool of governmental control of private interests. And this is a bit of a throwback to that. This idea that we should license radio stations, we should control these private businesses and make sure that they serve the public interest. It’s atavistic. It’s pre-modern. It’s primitive and should be done away with.
Bob Zadek: You say it’s primitive, should be done away with. Paul, to leave your sweet spot just for a moment—don’t get nervous—but California and other states—California for sure—has recently enacted legislation requiring corporations which I believe are incorporated in California or have their principal place of business here or an office here, I don’t recall which exactly, but they have passed legislation that says you cannot operate here unless you have the requisite number of women on the board. Now, that’s another example. If you assume that government, in this case California, has determined that more women on the board is in the—here it comes—“public interest,” California is saying you cannot have a license, that is a corporate charter to operate here, unless you operate in the, in this case, public interest of having women on the board. So all of this is—the lessons of history get repeated. It’s the same thing. You lose your license unless you operate in addition to making a profit for your shareholders, if you accomplish certain governmental ends.
The “Reality Czar” and the Danger of Intentions [43:48]
Bob Zadek: And not only that, Paul, but if you could speak to—I’m sure you’ve thought about it—the New York Times recently floated, after Biden’s election, they floated the concept of a “Reality Czar.” And I thought of your book and that concept, where that’s the Fairness Doctrine, if you will. So I know it’s not covered in your book, but I’m sure you’ve thought about it. So the New York Times, this trial balloon that it floated of urging Biden to appoint a Reality Czar, as if we needed to have reality legislated or else we didn’t know what was real—oh my god, kind of scary. But if you can—where does that—it failed, it fell flat—put that in the historical context of your book.
Paul Matzko: Yeah, well, the first thing I’ll note is that there is always—most of these bad ideas start with good intentions. So whether it’s a Reality Czar—and who can be in favor of alternate reality or misinformation or fake news or the lack of fairness? All of these are rooted in the best of intentions. The people who proposed the Fairness Doctrine really did just want to hear—they wanted stations to be fair and balanced in their programming, which is understandable. Who doesn’t want fair and balance? The question is, is it a good idea to give the state the coercive power to try to mandate those things? Right? So it’s not—it shouldn’t just be a question of, is that a good or bad concept? It is, is the state an appropriate tool for trying to create that thing? Because one of the lessons from my book is that the giving the state that power not only may not accomplish that end—it might not actually accomplish promoting fairness—it can do the opposite. And by my story, this is of the most successful episode of government censorship of the last half-century, one of the most significant episodes in US history of government censorship, is that that’s not fair, right? And the Fairness Doctrine was ironically used to promote a lack of fairness. It was used to protect governmental lies to the people, to protect the individual partisan interest of the Kennedy administration against the public interest of the actual public. So it’s a perversity. So the intentions of all these rules, whether it’s the public interest standard, whether it’s the Fairness Doctrine, whether it’s a Reality Czar, the intent of these people are often good, but they are just naive about what happens when you try to use state power to accomplish those ends. So I think that’s a big takeaway that applies to all these things, whether it’s a Reality Czar or a new Fairness Doctrine for the internet.
The Great Polish Ham Boycott [46:36]
Bob Zadek: You’re too charitable when you say the intent was pure, but it was bad way. To me, that was political cover, not intent. Now, you tell one anecdote. I want you to share this anecdote. What does suburban women and Polish sausage have to do with our topic this morning?
Paul Matzko: This is one of my favorite stories in the book. I kind of give a whole chapter to it. So I call it the Great Polish Ham Boycott. And you have to put yourself in the shoes of the mid-Cold War when people were very concerned about the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, the globe in general, but Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain, and that included Poland. And one of the things Poland was famous for at the time was its ham. They created, I guess they just had a large pig farm industry and they created a lot of ham that they supplied the rest of the globe. And JFK had been given the power by Congress, a kind of unilateral executive power to raise or lower tariffs in the name of national security. Does that sound familiar? Now, my friends, does that sound familiar?
Paul Matzko: Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right, Bob. It should sound familiar because it is that exact power, the literal one that was given to JFK, which Congress gave to him with the intention of him being able to bypass all the bother of going through the legislature to lower tariffs to promote free trade. That was the intent. But what it’s the same power that Donald Trump used during his administration to raise tariffs while claiming some sort of notional national security. He raised tariffs on lumber from Canada and on steel and aluminum from East Asia, leading to higher prices for consumers for dishwashers and lumber and the like. So there’s a perverse irony there, which is again, remember that any tool that you give the government to accomplish one end will someday likely be used to accomplish the opposite end by the other side.
But so this is going on in the early 60s. Kennedy wants to woo Eastern Europe, woo Poland out from under the kind of Soviet sphere of influence. And he’s going to do that by creating more free trade, encouraging trading ties will make them more interested in being allied with the US than they are with the Soviet Union. It kind of works. It actually leads to the rise of later on leads to the rise of Solidarity, the trade union movement in Poland, which overthrows Soviet control in the 80s and rules in the 90s. Well, they’re empowered, they’re literally like dockworkers, people involved in the trade that is promoted by Kennedy. But anyway, this is very unpopular, this freer trade with Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, among conservatives, especially these right-wing radio hosts. And they’re attacking it constantly. “Every penny you spend on a Polish ham is as good as putting a bullet in the gun of a Viet Cong soldier shooting at our boys in Vietnam.” There was actually a poem that circulated claiming that. So yeah, it sparks a mass boycott movement of suburban housewives in suburbs all around the country where they would print these cards that said things like, “Always buy your communist products at Super Giant.” They would swarm the stores and put these cards, thousands of them, in like the pockets of coats and boxes of toothpaste everywhere in the store and dare the store owners to arrest them, because if they did, it would be bad publicity that they arrested some housewife. And that undid Kennedy’s—or it put a question on Kennedy’s policy. It shows the power, the power of grassroots radio. Kind of gives you goosebumps.
Conclusion [50:58]
Bob Zadek: And I will mention to our friends out there, your book is chock-full of those anecdotes. It is very readable. It tells a fascinating story. And as you can see from this morning’s show, every syllable of your book is relevant today in the battle over the internet, over tariffs. It’s fascinating how important it is to understand even recent history so you can understand what’s going on. Paul’s book is a must-read, The Radio Right. It tells the story of how a small band of conservative radio broadcasters influenced policy profoundly and up until this day. So Paul, thank you so much for your book. Thank you so much for the hour of time you’ve spent with us this morning. And there are so many lessons, and it is such a readable book. It’s a page-turner. I invite our friends to get it and to read it and to learn from it. So Paul, thank you so much for your hour this morning. Thank you to my friends out there for spending an hour with us and have a happy Valentine’s Day.