| This study aims to prove how and why the principle of the “public interest” in American broadcasting came to be as it was; and what it meant in given social, economic, and political conditions. The study examines the competition between three major actors—the Commerce Department, the radio industry, and the public sector—over the meaning of public interest and its operation in the four thematic policy areas of citizen access and structural conditions; technological rationality; antimonopoly; and programming. This examination pays attention to the ideological complexity of the public interest, which retains the historical legacy of republican collectivism and classical liberal legal reasoning; and requires a distinction between the normative meaning of the public interest principle and its actual operation for structuring American radio broadcasting.; First, this study demonstrates that each of these three sectors uses the public interest differently corresponding to certain conditions and intentions of broadcasting policy-making, thus, revealing the undefined, unsettled nature of the public interest. The unsettled nature of the public interest allows each sector to project its own visions and interpretations onto the language and enables the language to become a primary legal standard. Second, it argues that to smooth out the inevitable conflicts created by the ideological discrepancies and regulatory operation of the public interest, technological rationality came into play and redefined the meaning of the public interest and its applications overtime. Third, this study reveals that the public sector interpreted the public interest in the moral vision of the collective good, attempting to institutionalize a public control model of national radio. Although the public sector's struggles demonstrate the potential of the public interest as a strong foundation for institutionalizing public rights of the airwaves, its failure proves that merely imposing normative obligations for commercial broadcasters was insufficient.; Based on this finding, finally, the study suggests the revision of our understanding of the public interest in favor of a critical conception for establishing a democratic communications system. A critical approach to the public interest recognizes the public as mobilized political power, and aims to expand the public good beyond a pluralistic understanding of interest. |
