Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age

by Brad Smith

As Pickard observes, “This criticism took shape across grassroots social movements, commentary from varied newspapers and opinion journals, as well as hundreds of letters from average listeners to editors, broadcasters, and the FCC.”26 Impatience reached a peak, leading the Federal Communications Commission in 1946 to publish its Blue Book, a report named after its blue cover that sought to make “the privilege of holding broadcast licenses contingent upon meeting substantive public interest requirements.”27 Commercial broadcasters unleashed a political backlash against the report and defeated its proposals, but the episode nonetheless altered broadcasting history, causing the major radio networks to fund documentaries and improve their public interest programming.28 Some might look at the revolt against radio and find in this history reason to believe that a challenge to social media might similarly represent a passing political moment, unlikely to lead to lasting regulatory change.