638
Opinion of the Court
quired the establishment of some regulatory mechanism to divide the electromagnetic spectrum and assign specific frequencies to particular broadcasters. See FCC v. League of Women Voters, supra, at 377 ("The fundamental distinguishing characteristic of the new medium of broadcasting . . . is that [b]roadcast frequencies are a scarce resource [that] must be portioned out among applicants") (internal quotation marks omitted); FCC v. National Citizens Comm. for Broadcasting, 436 U. S. 775, 799 (1978). In addition, the inherent physical limitation on the number of speakers who may use the broadcast medium has been thought to require some adjustment in traditional First Amendment analysis to permit the Government to place limited content restraints, and impose certain affirmative obligations, on broadcast licensees. Red Lion, 395 U. S., at 390. As we said in Red Lion, "[w]here there are substantially more individuals who want to broadcast than there are frequencies to allocate, it is idle to posit an unabridgeable First Amendment right to broadcast comparable to the right of every individual to speak, write, or publish." Id., at 388; see also Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. v. Democratic National Committee, 412 U. S. 94, 101 (1973).
Although courts and commentators have criticized the scarcity rationale since its inception,5 we have declined to question its continuing validity as support for our broadcast jurisprudence, see FCC v. League of Women Voters, supra, at 376, n. 11, and see no reason to do so here. The broadcast
5 See, e. g., Telecommunications Research and Action Center v. FCC, 801 F. 2d 501, 508-509 (CADC 1986), cert. denied, 482 U. S. 919 (1987); L. Bollinger, Images of a Free Press 87-90 (1991); L. Powe, American Broadcasting and the First Amendment 197-209 (1987); M. Spitzer, Seven Dirty Words and Six Other Stories 7-18 (1986); Note, The Message in the Medium: The First Amendment on the Information Superhighway, 107 Harv. L. Rev. 1062, 1072-1074 (1994); Winer, The Signal Cable Sends— Part I: Why Can't Cable Be More Like Broadcasting?, 46 Md. L. Rev. 212, 218-240 (1987); Coase, The Federal Communications Commission, 2 J. Law & Econ. 1, 12-27 (1959).
Page: Index Previous 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007