Readers of Paul Jacob’s Common Sense are quite aware that he has long targeted the FCC on this site, as can be seen by just a few of his past Common Sense commentaries:
- Net Neutrality, Dead Again (January 16, 2025)
- Gloating Time (December 17, 2019)
- Freak-Out, Death Threats and … Neutrality (December 17, 2017)
But if you yearn for something more, consult Robby Soave on Ayn Rand:
In 1962, Rand penned a prophetic warning about the public interest standard, which then–FCC Chair Newton N. Minow was citing to justify pressuring television companies to create more educational programming. Minow famously railed against a supposedly “vast wasteland” of shoddy television shows, and he claimed that the FCC’s charter empowered him to push for editorial changes to the medium that would align with his view of the public interest.
“You must provide a wider range of choices, more diversity, more alternatives,” said Minow in his well-remembered 1961 speech. “It is not enough to cater to the nation’s whims; you must also serve the nation’s needs.”
Minow repeatedly claimed that he was not in favor of government censorship and was not trying to tell broadcasters what they could and could not say. Rather, he charged them to make nebulous and ill-defined improvements to the product that he believed would be better appreciated by the American public — i.e., the public interest.
In her March 1962 essay “Have Gun, Will Nudge,” Rand argued that this was censorship by another name. “It is true, as Mr. Minow assures us, that he does not propose to establish censorship; what he proposes is much worse,” she wrote. Unlike explicit bans on speech, Rand warned, the modern method of censorship “neither forbids nor permits anything; it never defines or specifies; it merely delivers men’s lives, fortunes, careers, ambitions into the arbitrary power of a bureaucrat who can reward or punish at whim.”
Robby Soave, “Ayn Rand Denounced the FCC’s ‘Public Interest’ Censorship More Than 60 Years Ago,” Reason (January 2026).
Read the whole magazine piece at Reason’s online site.