Congressman Bullies TV Stations

A Congressman's effort to get an anti-Obamacare ad off the air reminds us what can happen when businesses depend on licenses instead of the individual right of property.

Americans for Prosperity created an ad criticizing Obamacare and bought air time for it in Michigan—but the sellers of that air time, the TV stations, don’t legally own it. They only have a Federal Communications Commission license to use airwaves. Lawyers for a Congressman who backed Obamacare have taken advantage of that fact to try to get the ad off the air .

“Failure to prevent the airing of ‘false and misleading advertising,’” the attorneys, representing the Senate campaign of Rep. Gary Peters, Democrat of Michigan, wrote, can lead to loss of a station’s broadcast license . And they pointed out that the Washington Post’s fact checker had awarded the ad, in which one cancer patient shares her health-insurance woes, two Pinocchios . (That's out of four -- and there's an argument that the Post's piece was  unjust .)

That is, the lawyers said that if the TV stations continued to air the anti-Obamacare ad, they were taking a gamble with their very existence. In an America where the IRS has gone after the president’s opponents, it’s not hard to imagine broadcasting businesses being too scared to take that bet—whether they thought the ad was true or not, whether they thought they should give voters the chance to evaluate the ad for themselves or not, and even whether they thought the courts would ultimately protect the ad as free speech or not.

But while Peters’s threat may have gained force from a recent scandal, the threat was made possible by the vulnerability American TV and radio stations have always had—the vulnerability that comes with depending on a license instead of relying on individual rights.

EXPLORE:

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• Alexander R. Cohen, Cronyists Fight to Defend Cosmetology Licensing
• David Kelley, Is There a Right to Health Care?
  

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