Radio Act of 1927 Establishes Public Ownership of Airwaves and "Public Interest" Broadcasting Standard

President Calvin Coolidge signs the Radio Act of 1927 (Public Law 632, 69th Congress), establishing the foundational principle that radio spectrum frequencies are publicly owned natural resources held in trust by the federal government for the American people. The legislation creates the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) and mandates that broadcast license holders must serve “the public interest, convenience, or necessity” - a revolutionary standard requiring private corporations using public airwaves to demonstrate public benefit in exchange for exclusive use of scarce broadcast frequencies.

The bipartisan Dill-White Bill, sponsored by Senator Clarence Dill (D-WA) and Representative Wallace H. White Jr. (R-ME), establishes that while the government will license private broadcasters to use specific frequencies, the electromagnetic spectrum itself remains public property requiring licensees to meet ongoing public interest obligations. This framework represents a critical middle ground between government-controlled broadcasting and unrestricted private ownership, creating enforceable public accountability for media corporations profiting from exclusive use of limited public resources.

The Act’s “public interest, convenience, or necessity” standard becomes the constitutional and legal foundation for all subsequent broadcast regulation, justifying content requirements (Fairness Doctrine 1949), ownership limits (seven-station rule 1953), children’s programming mandates, equal time provisions, and restrictions on monopoly concentration. The public ownership principle enables the Federal Communications Commission to deny or revoke licenses, enforce diversity requirements, and regulate broadcast content in ways that would be unconstitutional for print media - grounded in the scarcity of broadcast spectrum and the public’s ownership of the airwaves.

However, this regulatory framework is systematically dismantled through corporate-funded deregulation beginning in the Reagan era: the Fairness Doctrine is abolished (1987), ownership limits are repeatedly raised and then eliminated (Telecommunications Act 1996), and the “public interest” standard is effectively nullified through FCC regulatory capture and industry lobbying. The 90-year trajectory from the Radio Act’s public ownership doctrine (1927) to six corporations controlling 90% of American media (2017) demonstrates how foundational public interest protections can be eroded through sustained corporate lobbying even while the original legal framework remains nominally in force.