When the first media pioneers invented radio,, their vision was to make it a free, community medium shared by anyone. Even though the first amendment says that the government is supposed to allow freedom of speech, Radio was still regulated. This was mainly because there needed to be a governing body over the different airwaves and frequencies due to lack of space. Once major networks such as NBC started to put more and more radio stations on the air things started to loosen. After Ronald Reagan’s presidency ended in 1996, deregulation came into effect. With the Telecommunications Act of 1996 the FCC allowed up to 8 stations for each individual market. At this time the networks quickly took advantage of the new policy. Now there are all different types of radio stations with controversial topics of news and varieties of music. So I would say that deregulation was a good thing for radio and the changes were mostly positive.
No comments:
Post a Comment