The Federal Communications Commission is discussed across four episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, in each case as an example of federal regulation that guests argue is either obsolete, pretextual, or actively harmful to speech and competition. The treatments range from a call for outright abolition to a historical account of the agency’s origins in radio licensing and its role in the Kennedy administration’s conflict with conservative broadcasters.
Abolition as a budget proposal
In an episode devoted to a libertarian plan for federal budget cuts, Matt Welch, identified by Bob Zadek as editor-in-chief of Reason Magazine, names the FCC among the agencies to be eliminated. Welch says the commission “was launched way back when to allocate scarce broadcast spectrum,” when “there was only so much of that real estate out there,” and that “it’s no longer scarce.” He describes the agency as “basically an organization that’s trying every day to come up with new ways to maybe censor us just a little bit,” drawing a distinction between what “you can say this on live television and not that on live television,” and he mocks the prospect of “a very long study that talks about what is the precise minority and female ownership of second-tier radio stations in mid-markets.” His conclusion is: “Stop it. Just stop it.” A Libertarian Plan (2010)
Zadek endorses the proposal and extends it, saying that if “everyone in the FCC were fired and the FCC was closed down,” there would be “zero disruption in any American’s life and zero disruption in the economic marketplace, except everything would be cheaper.” He adds, in a joking register, that the only exposure would be the question of “who’s going to regulate wardrobe malfunctions,” warning listeners with children that “if you take away the FCC, who will regulate wardrobe malfunctions?” Welch replies by asking who would “turn on and off your television.” A Libertarian Plan (2010)
The FCC proposal sits in a list of cuts that includes getting the government out of the housing market, ending agricultural subsidies, dismantling the Davis-Bacon Act, repealing unspent stimulus money, and bringing troops home. Welch notes that Fannie and Freddie guarantee “trillions of dollars worth of mortgage,” and that more than $20 billion a year goes in direct payouts to farmers, naming Monsanto, big agribusiness and Archer Daniels Midland. A Libertarian Plan (2010)
The Kingsbury Commitment and the 1934 codification
In a later episode on the history of telecom innovation, Bill Frezza describes the pre-World War I telephone business as “a tremendously competitive business,” with “dozens and dozens of companies beating each other’s brains out to wire up the country.” He illustrates the era’s inventiveness with the Strowger switch, developed by an undertaker whose competitor’s wife was the town telephone operator and routed his calls to her husband. Bill Frezza’s History of Telecom Innovation (and Not) (2015)
Frezza dates the change to about 1913, the era of the trustbusters — Zadek interjects that it was also the year of the income tax, and Frezza agrees that “all these things are related.” AT&T, having begun running long-distance lines between cities, would offer a local phone company a connection to its long-distance network while refusing the same to competitors, then make “an offer you can’t refuse to buy your business.” Sued by the government for antitrust, AT&T made a deal called the Kingsbury Commitment, which Frezza calls “the foundation of what really became the public utility model in the telecom industry, and then the electrical industry, and then the gas industry across the country for basically a hundred years.” Bill Frezza’s History of Telecom Innovation (and Not) (2015)
Under that deal, Frezza says, AT&T asked for a monopoly — “Make us the only legal phone company in the country” — in exchange for promising to wire up the whole country and to charge “the stockbroker downtown the same price as we’re going to charge the farmer out in Iowa, even though it costs ten times as much to provide service to the farmer in Iowa by cross-subsidizing the system.” Frezza says this was “all codified in ‘34 when the FCC was formed,” and that the Interstate Commerce Commission got involved. Bill Frezza’s History of Telecom Innovation (and Not) (2015)
Zadek characterizes the arrangement as “a huge cross-subsidy,” a hidden tax and “a wealth transfer” from the urban dweller or urban business person to the farmer in Iowa, and asks whether the same structure underlies Obamacare and banking in America. He says governments learned long ago that “you can have private business do your bidding by having them be the tax collectors.” Bill Frezza’s History of Telecom Innovation (and Not) (2015)
The Fairness Doctrine and the Radio Right
A 2021 episode with Paul Matzko traces the FCC’s licensing regime to the 1920s. Matzko says Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, “says, ‘Hey, we don’t want a truly free market in radio,’” and that Hoover’s politics were “relatively progressive” — he disliked immigrants owning radio stations, broadcasting in languages other than English, and Catholic-owned stations. Pressure grew to use licensing so that only broadcasters serving “the public interest, convenience, or necessity” would be on the air, a phrase Matzko calls “the technical phrase, the legal phrase.” The Radio Right and The Fairness Doctrine (2021)
Matzko says the question of who decides what is necessary for the public is answered not by the public but by “a handful of lawyers” at what was first called the Federal Radio Commission and eventually renamed the Federal Communications Commission. He describes the licensing regime as “a way of controlling dissident speech, controlling speech by people who aren’t White Anglo-Saxon Protestants,” and says radio before the FCC system was “this fascinating, culturally diverse space where lots of experimentation and innovation is happening,” which afterward became “more corporate, more centralized, more mainstream, more moderate, more boring, whiter, more native.” The Radio Right and The Fairness Doctrine (2021)
The scarcity rationale, Matzko says, was an “ex post facto justification” — “an argument they made in court” that “was never actually codified in law.” He calls it “balderdash,” noting that “the FCC has never actually met the technical maximum number of stations possible. Not then, not now,” and that one of the commission’s first acts was to shrink the number of licensed stations to the benefit of big corporations and the nascent radio networks. The Radio Right and The Fairness Doctrine (2021)
Matzko also describes the Kennedy administration’s use of the FCC against conservative broadcasters. He says Kennedy, concerned about a right-wing radio surge made possible in the 1950s as the big networks shifted attention to television, used the IRS to audit broadcasters and try to remove their tax exemption, and used the Fairness Doctrine as well. Matzko quotes Kennedy telling his FCC chairman nominee in 1963 that “It is important that stations be kept fair,” adding that “what he means is fair to me.” The largest of the conservative broadcasters, Carl McIntire, had 20 million weekly listeners, which Matzko says is “as large as Rush Limbaugh some 40 years later.” The Radio Right and The Fairness Doctrine (2021)
Zadek frames the licensing of broadcast as resting on “a fiction, a misunderstanding of the laws of physics and electrodynamics,” and asks how radio came to be licensed when print was not. He calls “license” one of the more despicable words in government, “because it means you need permission to do something.” The Radio Right and The Fairness Doctrine (2021)
The FCC in the regulatory alphabet
In a 2017 episode on midnight regulations, Sam Batkins, identified by Zadek as a director of regulatory policy at the American Action Forum, gives an overview of the regulatory state. He says regulators approved roughly 3,600 federal rules the previous year, of which roughly 100 are considered “major,” which he glosses as imposing an annual economic impact of at least $100 million or more. A Lame Duck’s Last Stand (2017)
Batkins names the Environmental Protection Agency first among “the usual suspects,” noting that Congress has delegated a lot of power to it, and then lists “your typical alphabet soup of regulators from FCC to SEC to CFTC to CFPB.” He says that counting all regulators, “it’s something like 52 different regulatory agencies at least,” excluding sub-agencies. A Lame Duck’s Last Stand (2017)
Across episodes
The FCC is treated in four episodes spanning 2010 to 2021, and the excerpts show no development in the underlying argument so much as a division of labor: Welch in 2010 argues for abolition on grounds of obsolescence and censorship; Frezza in 2015 supplies the 1913 Kingsbury Commitment and 1934 codification as the agency’s institutional backstory; Matzko in 2021 supplies the 1920s Hoover-era licensing origins and the Kennedy-era Fairness Doctrine episode; and Batkins in 2017 mentions the FCC only in passing as one of roughly 52 regulatory agencies. The scarcity rationale is the recurring target — Welch says spectrum “is no longer scarce,” and Matzko calls the scarcity argument an ex post facto justification that was never codified in law.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the FCC’s current commissioners, its budget, its statutory authority beyond the licensing and Fairness Doctrine references, or any specific rulemaking other than the minority and female ownership study Welch mocks. They do not state what became of the Fairness Doctrine, when it ended, or what legal challenge established or rejected the scarcity rationale. No excerpt names a court case, a statute, or an amendment in connection with the FCC, and none gives the agency’s founding date beyond Frezza’s reference to 1934 and Matzko’s account of the 1920s licensing regime.