The Broken Compact

How the Guilty Parties Sold the American Airwaves — and Who Is Collecting the Rent

by Bob Simmons

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When I went to the University of Texas back in the 60’s there was a law on the books. It had been there since 1934. And today it still says plainly enough that a twelve-year-old could parse it, that companies granted the privilege of using the American airwaves must operate “in the public interest, convenience, and necessity.”

Nine words. Still in the United States Code. Invoked at every FCC license renewal like a grace said before a meal glutinously and drunkenly devoured.

Franklin Roosevelt signed the Communications Act on June 19, 1934 on a single governing premise: the electromagnetic spectrum belongs to the public. Private companies may use it — temporarily, conditionally, under license — only as trustees. Fail the public and lose the license. The law was that direct.

Then came the wrecking crew. They did not come all at once. They came in waves, each one wearing a different disguise: deregulation, modernization, competition, innovation, the marketplace of ideas. The disguises changed. Over the years the project did not.

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The First Wave: Mark Fowler and His Toaster

Ronald Reagan appointed Mark Fowler to chair the FCC in 1981. Fowler had previously been Reagan’s campaign communications counsel — a credential for regulatory capture if one ever existed. His philosophy was not complicated. Television, he announced to Reason magazine, was “just another appliance — a toaster with pictures.“ Not a medium through which a democracy conducts its deliberation. Not a finite public resource licensed to private parties under explicit legal obligation. A kitchen appliance. Something you own outright and operate however you like.

He governed accordingly. By 1987, Fowler’s successors had abolished the Fairness Doctrine — the fifty-year-old policy requiring broadcasters to cover controversial public issues fairly and to present contrasting viewpoints. Congress passed legislation to codify the doctrine into statute. Reagan vetoed it. Congress could not override him. A subsequent attempt died on the threat of another veto. Rush Limbaugh’s nationally syndicated program launched within months of the repeal — a format his own affiliates acknowledged would have been legally untenable under the old rules. The economics of one-sided outrage had been federally licensed. Hate had been monetized.

Roger Ailes was watching. Rupert Murdoch was watching. They would wait nine years, then open Fox News.

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The Second Wave: Bill Clinton and the Great Giveaway

On February 8, 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act — the first major overhaul of communications law since 1934 and, in retrospect, one of the most consequential acts of bipartisan vandalism in modern American governance. The bill passed the Senate ninety-one to five. This was destruction on a nearly consensual scale. The lobbyists for the National Association of Broadcasters had done their work with admirable efficiency.

The Act eliminated the national cap on radio station ownership entirely. Prior to 1996, no entity could own more than forty stations. The new law replaced this limit with nothing whatsoever.

Clear Channel Communications, a company with forty-three stations in 1995, recognized the opportunity with the focused enthusiasm of a man who has just been told the buffet is free and the doors are locked. Within six years it owned 1,240 stations and reached a hundred million listeners a day. A single company. The local programming that had characterized American radio — the local news, the community affairs, the sense that your radio station was operated by people who lived where you lived — was gutted with industrial efficiency. Stations were automated. National formats were beamed by satellite. Local voices were replaced by recordings made in Dallas. The public interest standard survived only as language on merger approval forms that approved everything.

Clear Channel later renamed itself iHeartMedia, apparently on the theory that if you can no longer serve communities, you can at least claim to love them.

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The Third Wave: Sinclair and the Science of Counterfeit Journalism

Television followed the same logic, but with an additional malice: it dressed corporate consolidation in the trusted clothing of local journalism.

Sinclair Broadcast Group now owns over 185 television stations covering forty percent of American households — broadcasting under the call letters of your local ABC, CBS, NBC, or Fox affiliate. The anchor you trust, the face you’ve watched for years, the person who seems to know your town, is a Sinclair product.

For years, Sinclair required all its local stations to air centrally produced political commentary from Boris Epshteyn — a former Trump campaign official — without disclosure to viewers. It distributed “must-run” segments loaded with politically slanted premises and required trusted local anchors to deliver them directly into living rooms. It pioneered the Question of the Day, a format for laundering partisan framing as folksy audience engagement.

The company’s defining achievement came in 2018, when it required anchors at nearly two hundred stations to read an identical script — word for word, market for market — warning viewers about the dangers of biased media. The video collage of dozens of trusted local faces reciting the same propaganda, compiled and published by journalist Timothy Burke, was viewed tens of millions of times. Jon Leiberman, Sinclair’s own Washington bureau chief, called the content “biased political propaganda, with clear intentions to sway this election.” He was fired the same day.

This is who holds your local broadcast license in trust for the public interest.

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The Current Wave: Brendan Carr and the Captured Agency

The Federal Communications Commission was designed by Congress to be independent — insulated from presidential pressure, accountable to the public, not the administration. The word “independent” has since been removed from the agency’s website.

Not metaphorically. Literally deleted.

Brendan Carr, named FCC chairman by Donald Trump on inauguration day 2025, stood before the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 27, 2026 and celebrated — to cheers — the defunding of PBS and NPR and the removal of specific named journalists from the air. The chairman of an independent regulatory agency was delivering a victory lap to a partisan political conference over the professional destruction of journalists whose coverage displeased the president.

The 1934 Act was built specifically to prevent this. The FCC was given independence precisely because Congress understood what Senator Clarence Dill had warned in 1927: “American thought and American politics will be largely at the mercy of those who operate these stations, for publicity is the most powerful weapon that can be wielded in a republic.”

Carr has wielded that power in one direction only. He opened investigations into CBS, NPR, and PBS for content decisions. He threatened the broadcast licenses of television stations over their coverage of the administration’s military operations. He has treated the license renewal process — established by law as an instrument of public accountability — as a weapon of political intimidation.

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The Beneficiaries: Name Them

Which brings us to the men who are collecting the rent on ninety years of regulatory demolition.

David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, purchased CBS through a merger of his production company Skydance with Paramount Global — an $8 billion deal approved by Carr’s FCC in July 2025. The merger was approved after Paramount paid Donald Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit widely described by legal scholars as baseless — a lawsuit Trump had filed over a 60 Minutes interview. The $16 million appears in court documents. The settlement cleared the regulatory path. Stephen Colbert called it, on air, “a big fat bribe.” CBS did not renew his contract. Trump praised the decision.

Following the merger, Ellison installed Bari Weiss — a conservative commentator who founded The Free Press, a publication he then acquired for $150 million — as editor-in-chief of CBS News. He installed Kenneth Weinstein, former chief executive of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, as CBS News ombudsman. A source inside CBS News told Congress that Weinstein’s role was to suppress 60 Minutes coverage unfavorable to the administration; a finished report on Trump deportations was held from broadcast for weeks, airing only after Ellison’s office cleared it.

This is the network of Edward R. Murrow. Of Walter Cronkite. Of Watergate. In the public interest, convenience, and necessity.

Ellison is now attempting to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery — the parent company of CNN and HBO — in a deal his own allies describe to reporters, without embarrassment, as certain to pass regulatory review because Ellison is “the only buyer who would pass muster with Trump administration regulators.” The double meaning was not lost on one Ellison adviser, who called it “the Trump card” and reportedly enjoyed saying it. The DOJ removed its antitrust chief, Gail Slater — confirmed with bipartisan support and widely viewed as a check on political interference in mergers — in February 2026, days before the review of the Paramount-Warner deal reached a critical stage.

Larry Ellison, David’s father and the second-richest man in the world, has communicated directly with Trump administration officials about changes to CNN. He reportedly discussed with White House staff which CNN anchors Trump would like to see removed. He is a financial backer of the effort to hand TikTok’s American operations to a consortium of Trump-friendly investors, delivering the president another political win over a communications platform he wishes to control.

Rupert Murdoch built Fox News on the rubble of the Fairness Doctrine and has operated it for thirty years as the single most potent instrument of political propaganda in American broadcast history — using public broadcast licenses, public airwaves, and the public interest standard he has never acknowledged, to methodically reshape American political reality in directions favorable to his financial interests and personal ideological preferences. He has done this legally. The law that was supposed to prevent it was abolished in 1987.

These are not villains from a morality play. They are businessmen operating rationally within a regulatory environment that has been deliberately constructed over four decades to reward exactly what they are doing: the conversion of the public airwaves into private instruments of political power.

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The Law Remains. The Will to Enforce It Does Not.

The Communications Act of 1934 has not been repealed. The FCC retains, today, full authority to deny license renewals to broadcasters who have failed the public interest standard — to impose conditions on mergers protecting local journalism, to require minimum public affairs programming as the price of holding a public license.

It does not use these powers. Under Carr, it has made emphatically clear that it will use the licensing process not as an instrument of public accountability but of political alignment — threatening the licenses of broadcasters whose coverage displeases the administration while waving through consolidation deals for those whose politics are satisfactory. This is precisely what Nixon attempted during Watergate. The lesson of that era was supposed to be that a president must never be permitted to weaponize the FCC against a free press.

That lesson has been unlearned with remarkable thoroughness.

The airwaves still belong to the American people. The law still says so. But the trustees have stopped paying rent, they have remodeled without a permit, and are now renting the property back to the landlord’s political enemies at rates they set for themselves.

Nine words: in the public interest, convenience, and necessity. (Whose interest, whose convenience, and whose necessity?)

Someone should try enforcing them.

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The Communications Act of 1934: 47 U.S.C. § 151 et seq. The Fairness Doctrine abolished August 4, 1987. Telecommunications Act of 1996: Pub. L. 104-104. Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 395 U.S. 367 (1969). The Paramount-Skydance $16 million Trump settlement: court record, July 2025. The Skydance-Warner Bros. Discovery proposed acquisition: ongoing as of March 2026. Brendan Carr’s CPAC remarks: March 27, 2026, on video.