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Comment by throwaway48476 | Hacker News Reader

The FCC was created in order to prevent the airing of opinions the government disfavored.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin

This is incredibly hyperbolic and misleading. The Communications Act of 1934 was passed for a variety of very necessary reasons at the time, the most important being making sure broadcasters didn't hijack each other's signals.

Coughlin's show coincided with the creation of the FCC and they never really tangled. His show was pulled off the network a full 5 years after the FCC was established. FCC regulation may have had a part in that, but there is no reason to believe he in particular was targeted and certainly not that the law was passed to target him.

In an amusingly bald bit of Wikipedia editorializing, while the Coughlin page links to the Communications Act page in the context of (as the upthread throwaway account[1] says) half-implying that it was created to censor opinions...

...the actual page linked doesn't mention Coughlin at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934

[1] The habit of throwing discussion bombs like this from throwaway accounts is another sign of HN's decay.

For anyone interested, I went digging. In fact the citation for that (FCC Chair) McNinch quote that is (not quite correctly) excerpted in the Coughlin article is a 1938 Times article talking about how he'd "recently" said it in a speech (I can't find a cite for the speech itself).

The FCC was created in 1934, four years earlier. So arguing from this basis that it was created to censor is clearly just plain wrong. The wikipedia narrative on the Coughlin page is basically a lie.

Government licensing of radio spectrum preceded the FCC and was in response to the RF chaos that hampered the rescue operation after the sinking of the Titanic[1].

[1] https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/radio-act-of-1912/

That's why I wrote "the FCC" of which is the thread subject.

Never heard of him before. Thanks for sharing.

You are spreading misinformation. The FCC existed before Coughlin. Furthermore, the FCC declined to take action on Coughlin despite all the pressure it got from the public. Instead, it was the National Association of Broadcasters that forced him off the air.

Coughlin started broadcasting in 1926. The FCC was created in 1934.

How exactly did the FCC exist before him?

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