Of their total schedules, stations were required to devote 5% to news and 5% to public affairs programming. Only a handful of stations ever lost their licenses -- but the threat was real.
"In the old days, broadcasters spent" heavily to "make sure their licenses were renewed," said Gene Kimmelman, a senior director at Consumers Union, a Washington-based advocacy group.
But by the 1980s, a new attitude was taking hold. As part of its assault on government regulation, the Reagan administration relaxed the demands on broadcasters.
"The FCC then stood for Federal Cannot Commission," said Mark Fowler, who served as the agency's chairman during the Reagan years. "Telecommunications was being choked to death by regulation, so we went about eliminating hundreds of different rules."
The idea, he added, was that "the consumer would be king. They would choose. We eliminated content rules because we were acting as censors, looking at scripts. That's a 1st Amendment violation.
"Public interest is defined by the public's interest rather than by regulators in green eyeshades sitting in the central office in Washington."
Eventually, the renewal period was lengthened to eight years from three. Comparative hearings were done away with. Rules restricting the amount of advertising were eliminated, and bans on commercials during children's programming were lifted. The requirement to have at least 10% news and public affairs programming disappeared.
Copps said the licensing process now is so streamlined -- replaced by a pro forma procedure -- that it has become little more than a "postcard renewal."
Rather than provide commitments on how they would meet the public interest, stations today are required to keep logs, updated every quarter, listing ways that they have served the public. For instance, the "public file" for the first quarter at KNBC Channel 4 in Los Angeles runs 48 pages. The document notes that Channel 4 News reported on everything from Amber alerts to rising gasoline prices to the effectiveness of electric toothbrushes.
Critics say these logs are a poor substitute for a more painstaking license renewal process that would focus on whether programming is truly reflecting the community interest.
"Nobody looks at these files, because they are pointless and not specific enough to be able to make a public interest assessment," said Andrew Schwartzman of the Media Access Project, a public advocacy group in Washington.
