The most interesting aspect of the turmoil that has beset the broadcast media, its corporate masters, the FCC, and the public in the wake of the Janet Jackson Super Bowl slip has been the philosophical arguments either for or against media content regulation.

Many have taken an absolute or near-absolute free speech stance and said they don't want the government to regulate the content of the media at all: that Janet and Howard Stern and the Love Sponge and other assorted miscreants should be able to do whatever they want over the air and that the marketplace should be the final arbiter (which it ultimately is anyway).

I have argued that unlike any other media, including satellite, cable or the Internet, the airwaves are inherently limited in capacity and owned by the public and available without mediation to anyone with the equipment to receive the signals, therefore it is entirely right and proper for the public to determine - and its representatives in government to implement and enforce - standards of what is and is not appropriate material: that the media, in other words, can be directed on a meta level and as a people it is not inevitable that we accept "anything goes" from our media, at least our media braodcast over the public airwaves.

In a NY Times book review of Paul Starr's THE CREATION OF THE MEDIA: Political Origins of Modern Communications, James Fallows discusses just this theme:

Conventionally, Americans think that the most important fact about their news media is that, thanks to the First Amendment, they are ''free.'' The absence of governmental controls over parts of the media — though not all, as witness broadcasters' wrangles with the Federal Communications Commission — has indeed made America's communications system distinctive. But the emphasis on the First Amendment implies that the media's evolution has been automatic and unplanned.

What Starr argues — and, in my view, powerfully demonstrates — is that every branch of the communications system reflects deliberate political choices made under particular historic circumstances. To give one example, out of scores in the book: through the 1700's the British government feared that newspapers would fan political opposition and so restricted their growth, not directly but through onerous taxes. When, for budgetary reasons, it tried to apply these taxes to the American colonies, through the Stamp Act of 1765, it met outraged resistance. ''The colonists famously opposed the measure on the grounds that it was taxation without representation, but the specific nature of the tax also mattered,'' Starr says. The Stamp Act's burden would fall on the newspapers and pamphlets that had been so important in developing a revolutionary sensibility. As the new American republic took form, it devised a sweeping range of measures designed to foster the growth and circulation of newspapers, including as many local ones as possible.

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