Charles W. Chook Bryant

And they ran around yelling that out and said, we heard it on our radio.

And everyone's like, these people, lock them up.

Well, because off the cuff, that's a great joke.

But if you workshop that over a few hours, then I don't know.

Yeah.

So in the 1940s.

The FCC, and there's some background to all this that we'll get to, but we haven't even really said what the Fairness Doctrine is yet.

No, no.

Finally, in 1949, the U.S.

government said, you know what?

We need some help here.

We're a little bit worried that, geez, somebody could, some private citizen who's wealthy could go and buy all the radio stations and essentially propagandize the news.

Right.

And there's nothing we can do about it.

That's right, via something called the Fairness Doctrine, which had the overall goal of basically, and it's very kind of cute to look back at this time period, but its initial goal was to make sure that all the information on the radio waves was good information and true and fair and enriching.

And there's only so much space on a radio dial, and this is very critical information.

that there were a limited number of frequencies available.

Yeah, let's just put a pin in that because that's a very big deal is how this weighed in the favor of the Fairness Doctrine and then also kind of helped kill it in some ways.

Sure.

But basically, the very progressive view that public interests outweigh private interests and the public has a right to really good information over the free speech of the broadcaster even.