The U.S. Supreme Court was set to consider on Thursday a major challenge aimed at ending the second-class status of broadcast television under the First Amendment.
A petition in the case of Minority Television Project v. FCC asks the court to overturn its 1969 Red Lion decision, which gave broadcasters less protection from government regulation than other media enjoy. Because of the limited broadcast spectrum, the court ruled then, government intervention was justified to prevent signal overlap and chaos on the airwaves. As a result, the court gave only “intermediate scrutiny” to government broadcast regulations, unlike the often fatal “strict scrutiny” reserved for restrictions on print media.
