Re: Yes it's a privilège
You ask a fair and important question. Important enough that I think it's worth a genuine effort to give you a detailed answer...
1. Why do you think that it is a right? Please explain.
The US Constitution explicitly grants, through the First Amendment, the right to free speech.
2. Is it also a right to drive down the wrong side of the highway?"
I realise that you've picked a provactive counterpoint - and that's OK - but here I think context matters... and the context needs to consider relative harms.
If you drive a vehicle down the wrong side of the highway, you endanger yourself, your passengers and other road users.
By contrast, if you say something that a viewer or listener does not like, or disagrees with, they have the freedom to change stations or switch off entirely.
Therefore, in a practical and probably legal sense there is a distinction we can make between the actions of a third party where you have the total freedom to negate those actions if you so wish, and the actions of a third party that you may have limited or no abilities to influence. If you don't like my radio broadcast, you can change channels. If I drive my 18-wheeler in to your Ford compact in a head-on collision, I'm going to be annoyed at the scratch on the front fender and you're going to be, well, a lot worse off. What I'm trying to say is that the law tries to ensure that the safeguards it provides are proportionate to the risks and to the rights of the constitution.
Also, it's important to note the much more adversarial relationship between citizens and the federal government compared with their city, municipal, local, council or even state governments. Many Americans have much higher levels of trust in their local municipal government than they do in the federal government. That's one of the reasons why it would be so hard to remove the 2nd Amendment from the Constitution.
3. Its a privilege because there are limited resources and in order to keep things running correctly for all it is important that there is coherent practices. So the privilege is given to those that behave and removed from those that don't.
There are quite a few elements to unpack here and I'm not completely confident I will identify them all, or do them justice, but let's give it a go.
First, the limited resources. This was certainly the case back in the early days of broadcast media, when spectrum was limited and any bad management could ruin the medium for all concerned. For example, between the early 1920s and the late 1930s, all broadcast radio operated on the Medium Wave Band. Spectrum was limited and so to avoid crosstalk between stations, a federal agency was set up to ensure that the patchwork-quilt of different broadcasters were laid out nationally in a way that didn't cause interference. Eminently sensible.
Many technological enhancements have happened since that time... The UHF band was opened for television; the transition from Analogue TV broadcasts to digital (DTT, using the DVB-T/DVB-T2 and ATSC Standards) *massively* opened up the available spectrum, allowing for orders of magnitude more broadcast channels within the same frequency spectrum. Happening roughly in parallel, the US in particular saw a huge increase in satellite television coverage, with Direct-Broadcast Satellite (DBS) now making it possible to receive anywhere from 50-300+ individual channels. And of course, there's the cable approach - both the traditional/legacy "CableTV" as well as the more modern and often fibre-based "broadband" cable service.
So that basic premise, the foundation argument that "bandwidth is highly limited and thus we need onerous regulation to ensure this scarce commodity is not wasted" is simply no longer a viable or logical argument. That pretty much pulls the rug out from most of the justification for having an FCC in the first place. [ The glaring exclusion from that, of course, concerns propriety - ensuring that what is broadcast is factually accurate [advertising] and not offensive [violence, nudity, sex, use of drugs, etc]]. But just to underscore this a second time - ALL of those activities of the FCC absolutely MUST be weighed against the 1st Amendment right of Free Speech. It cannot be repeated often enough that the Constitution explicitly mentions Free Speech. The "FCC" doesn't get a single mention. ;o)
Anarchy never provides anything other than destruction, whereby all parties lose.
Now you touch on something that's particularly interesting and [I suspect, but I'm not sure] might actually be unique to the United States. have you heard of "Public-Access Television" or "Public-Access Broadcasting"? It was actually introduced in the United States between 1969 and 1971 - BY THE SAME FCC THAT IS NOW THREATENING BROADCASTERS THE ADMINISTRATION DOESN'T LIKE - and it created the means by which ANY member of the public could create their own television content and have it broadcast. To be fair, this brought about some of the whackiest, craziest broadcast content you could possibly imagine... but it completely and thoroughly disproves your point about "anarchy never provides anything other than destruction". Quite the contrary. Head out in to the mid-west, between the coasts... and you'll find plenty of folk who'll tell you that a "Brewskie Night" involved buying a few crates of beer, inviting your mates round, and sitting down to watch a couple of hours of batsh1t crazy Public Access Broadcasting. You definitely need the beer, though.
I think there are a couple more points that are worth making in conjunction with your comments.
Some of the greatest harms to be inflicted on media in the United States [particularly television] have come since 2016 and have been propagated by a small number of extremely vocal media outlets: Fox News, NewsMax, OAN, but where there is substantial [and not disputed] evidence that the broadcasters have been repeating lies and outright fabrications in a pretty brazen attempt to generate outrage among their audience.
But just to try and stick a pin in that, here's an example of what I mean. In 2018, Fox News host Tucker Carlson described a $150,000 payment made by Donald Trump to Karen McDougal - with whom he had had an extra-marital affair - as "extortion. In reality, that payment was part of a catch-and-kill scheme, operated by Donald Trump and David Pecker of American Media, to squash "bad press" during Trump's 2016 Presidential Campaign. McDougal sued Fox, in essence arguing that describing her as an extortionist was slanderous and wrong. The Fox defense was that Carlson's statements were "merely non-literal commentary, rhetorical hyperbole, and "opinion commentary", intended to frame a political debate, rather than actionable statements of objective fact."
The case was dismissed, in essence handing Fox "News" the win.
And therein lies the problem... When Fox on the right wing and MS NOW on the left wing broadcast deeply biased, selectively reported and leading segments as "news", it undermines the trust that can be placed in broadcast news. *That* is something the FCC should be concerned about and should be dealing with.
The fact that Fox, OAN, NewsMax and MSNOW and all the others continue to exist and continue to operate is as informative as a book could be. The differences between the regulation of news in the US and the UK could not be more different.
The challenge with the US regulatory framework - and this has recently been completely overturned by a recent ruling from the Supreme Court of the United States, which overturned the 1984 landmark case, "Chevron U.S.A., Inc, v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. That case had made settled law the idea that when it came to interpretation of federal law, government agencies were presumed to be the authority in their respective area of expertise. In June 2024, the Roberts Court issued a landmark ruling in Loper Bright Enterprise v. Raimondo that threw that out - and granted the Courts, ultimately the Supreme Court, the role of the ultimate arbiter and interpreter of legal meaning.
So now, despite everything that Brendan Carr says about the FCC considering revocation of licenses... the Roberts court would like a word. They basically cut the ground out from under Carr [on paper only - the chances of them disagreeing is extremely remote], since SCotUS basically granted themselves "Imperium" (supreme executive, military and judicial power, from ancient Rome) to do pretty much whatever they want.
Ultimately, I think the elements you raise in your argument do not stand the sniff test against shifts in technology or society, but I concede the effect remains unchanged thanks to the highly partisan nature of governance that the US operates.
Given an choice between the US model and say the UK model, I think it's pretty safe to say that all the evidence points to the idea that the UK model - largely non-partisan - has proven to be the more successful. Of course, that will never be reached in the United States - because while there is a numeric minority [currently in the right-of-centre politics] of voters, they will always argue in favour of a model that allows the minority to win and retain power.
This is why the US currently exists as a criteriarchy [a government or political system led by the judiciary], not a democracy [government led by the people], given the simple facts that:-
1. Appointments to the highest court of the land are intrinsically political
2. The current SCotUS has issued countless brazenly partisan rulings
I don't think that - or the model of broadcasting - is likely to change soon.
