Ed Sullivan testifying at a Federal Communications Commission hearing on television programming in 1961 Everett For broadcasters in the twentieth century - the century when broadcasting was the main transmission belt for mass communications in America, unlike the present century - the phrase they all knew by heart sounded less like a reminder than a threat. The granting of a broadcast license by the Federal Communications Commission was contingent upon the licensee operating in "the public interest, convenience, or necessity." The vagueness of the language left plenty of room for interpretation and anxiety. Besides generating obscene profits, what exactly was the proper civic role of a radio or television station - Educational programming? Political forums? Tornado warnings? And when did the feds have the authority to swoop in and turn off the spigot by lifting the license (aka "permission to print money")? Related Stories News The Bid to Oust Performers Like Jimmy Kimmel Has Been in the Works for Four Decades TV The Ed Sullivan Theater After Colbert: Last Days of a Late Night Icon The mix of government regulation, broadcaster responsibilities, and the public interest in allowing entertainers to mouth off over the airwaves has come into sharp relief recently due to a single line in a monologue by Jimmy Kimmel. What ratcheted up the Kimmel controversy from the usual kerfuffle over a wardrobe malfunction or obscene utterance was the intervention of FCC chairman Brendan Carr, who said Kimmel should be suspended and "we can do this the easy way or the hard way." The head fed, of course, also weighed in from his digital lectern. If not exactly a jackboot on the neck, the pressure on Disney from the FCC underscored who really controlled the means of communication. The big complication for electronic media in terms of First Amendment protection is that, unlike print, neither film nor broadcasting was on the radar of the Founding Fathers. The motion picture industry engaged in a prolonged legal and cultural battle to gain recognition as a medium of free expression - until 1952 it was considered "a business pure and simple" and could be regulated like food and drugs. Only in the late 1960s did it secure a safe place under the umbrella of the First Amendment. By contrast, broadcasting over the airwaves has always been a special case. Radio and television signals are transmitted over the electromagnetic spectrum (quaintly called "the ether" in the trade press) that encircles earth's atmosphere. The bandwidths or frequencies that carry the signals (channels to us non-engineers) are likened to the lanes of a freeway. To prevent the literal crossing of signals, a traffic cop (the government) needs to allocate and regulate the space. From this vantage, the spectrum is publicly owned real estate, like a national park, over which individual broadcasters have a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the land. In 1927, the U.S. Congress passed the first major enabling legislature for electronic communication, the Radio Act. It created an omnibus regulatory agency with the authority to allocate space on the spectrum, without which a broadcaster could not beam out signals and thereby sell audiences to advertisers. Broadcasters did not own the space; they were tenants with a limited government lease. It also marked the first appearance of the money phrase "the public interest, convenience, or necessity." Thus, unlike disgruntled newspaper readers, whose only resort was to write an angry letter to the editor, radio listeners could now vent their frustrations by going over the heads of a local affiliate and complaining directly to the government. In 1929, a group of Protestant ministers sent a resolution to the Federal Radio Commission protesting the incessant cigarette advertising on radio and arguing, sensibly enough, that "the public interest, convenience, and necessity is not served in what seems to be a campaign to transform 20,000,000 boys and girls into cigarette addicts." (After the Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health in 1964, the FCC basically agreed, but it took an act of Congress in 1971 to ban cigarette advertisements from radio and television.) In 1934, in tune with the outlook of FDR's New Deal, the 1927 act was replaced with more expansive legislation giving the commission greater power and purview, including over the hegemonic AT&T, the telephone oligopoly. The watchdog-regulator was now called the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, which, like FBI, became a set of enduring initials among the New Deal's alphabet agencies. Significantly, the 1934 act specifically forbade censorship, flatly stating that the government did not have "the power of censorship over radio communications or signals transmitted by any radio station." In the next years, the FCC assumed provenance over FM and TV, but in terms of programming content it remained mainly hands-off. Of course, as radio penetrated every por