Whose Public Interest Is it Anyway?

[Commentary] At the Federal Communications Commission's Future of Media workshop, Jerry Fritz of Allbritton Communications was asked whether there were any stations not fulfilling their public interest programming obligations. Fritz challenged the FCC's right to define what those obligations are for every TV and radio station in the country.

"The problem the government faces ... is, whose public interest are we talking about?" he said. "Everybody here has a different sense of how they would program their station. There isn't anything called the public interest." In his opening remarks, Fritz said broadcasters take the job of figuring out what's in the public's interest rather seriously. "Notwithstanding historical attempts to impose someone else's idea of necessary programming, broadcasters, as content creators, monitor what the public wants on a daily basis," he said. "We evaluate what they are, what they watch, when they watch and how they watch. We even speculate on why they watch."

To some, Fritz's combativeness might be seen as a tad excessive. Truth is, broadcasters don't have much in the way government-imposed public interest programming obligations today. Essentially, they are required to air three hours of decent educational or informational programming for children each week. That's about it. But Fritz is rightly concerned that the regulatory pendulum that swung so far toward deregulation in the 1980s is swinging back toward regulation now.