Petition Against Fox: Removal of the Broadcasting license issued by the FCC

[onenote]

200. Since you'll have some free time,

borrow a copy of the Constitution and read the First Amendment.
Also, study up on William O. Douglas. A lot of us progressives regard him as the gold standard when it comes to issues relating to the First Amendment. I'm guessing you don't know much about him at all.

Here's Douglas on the First Amendment, broadcasting, and the government-imposed "responsibility":

"My conclusion is that TV and radio stand in the same protected position under the First Amendment as do newspapers and magazines. The philosophy of the First Amendment requires that result, for the fear that Madison and Jefferson had of government intrusion is perhaps even more relevant to TV and radio than it is to newspapers and other like publications. That fear was founded not only on the spectre of a lawless government but of government under the control of a faction that desired to foist its views of the common good on the people. In popular terms that view has been expressed as follows:

'The ground rules of our democracy, as it has grown, require a free press, not necessarily a responsible or a temperate one. There aren't any halfway stages. As Aristophanes saw, democracy means that power is generally conferred on second-raters by third-raters, whereupon everyone else, from first-raters to fourth-raters, moves with great glee to try to dislodge them. It's messy but most politicians understand that it can't very well be otherwise and still be a democracy.' Stewart, reviewing Epstein, News From Nowhere: Television and the News (1972), Book World, Washington Post, March 25, 1973, pp. 4-5.
COLUMBIA BROADCASTING v. DEMOCRATIC COMM., 412 U.S. 94 (1973)(Douglas concurring).