http://www.reason.com/news/show/119743.html

A few good snippets:

Last year, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), the lobbying group for local radio and TV stations, began running a series of truly awful advertisements attacking satellite radio. In one, for example, you hear the play-by-play for a baseball game. Just as the announcer gets to a crucial point in the action, an operator interrupts, and asks you the listener to deposit money to keep listening, as if you were on a pay phone. A voiceover then announces, "Radio. You shouldn't have to pay for it."

The ads were economically illiterate (as if the time you spend listening to the endless commercials on traditional radio were free), blatantly dishonest (you pay a monthly fee for satellite radio, not by the hour), and roundly criticized for their broad assault on the intelligence of the average radio listener. But the NAB stuck with them. They were part of the NAB's longstanding, sometimes vicious attack on satellite radio, an emerging medium that the NAB clearly sees as a long-term threat. And with good reason.

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NAB initially opposed the federal government allocating any spectrum at all to satellite start-ups. Its lobbying efforts then managed to delay that allocation for seven years. Finally, the FCC doled out the spectrum, but licensed only two companies to broadcast in the U.S., what would become XM and Sirius. Thanks in large part to the NAB's recalcitrance, satellite radio would get just two chances to find its footing. To borrow a cliched analogy, imagine if buggy whip manufacturers had successfully lobbied Congress to limit all manufacture of automobiles in the U.S. to just Ford and Chevrolet. If both failed, well, then that probably would have been a good indication that there just wasn't much of a market for automobiles in America.

The second article: http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009954

Throughout most of history, humans lived in a state of extreme information poverty. News traveled slowly, field to field, village to village. Even with the printing press's advent, information spread at a snail's pace. Few knew how to find printed materials, assuming that they even knew how to read. Today, by contrast, we live in a world of unprecedented media abundance that once would have been the stuff of science-fiction novels. We can increasingly obtain and consume whatever media we want, wherever and whenever we want: television, radio, newspapers, magazines and the bewildering variety of material available on the Internet.

This media cornucopia is a wonderful development for a free society--or so you'd think. But today's media universe has fierce detractors, and nowhere more vehemently than on the left. Their criticisms seem contradictory. Some, such as Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, contend that real media choices, information sources included, remain scarce, hindering citizens from fully participating in a deliberative democracy. Others argue that we have too many media choices, making it hard to share common thoughts or feelings; democracy, community itself, again loses out. Both liberal views get the story disastrously wrong. If either prevails, what's shaping up to be America's Golden Age of media could be over soon.

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Both liberal groups would love to put their thumbs on the scale and tilt the media in their preferred direction. Scarcity-obsessed Dennis Kucinich has recently introduced plans in Congress to revive the Fairness Doctrine, which once let government regulators police the airwaves to ensure a balancing of viewpoints, however that's defined. [...] Mr. Sunstein also proposes a kind of speech redistributionism. For the Internet, he suggests that regulators could impose "electronic sidewalks" on partisan Web sites (the National Rifle Association's, say), forcing them to link to opposing views. The practical problems of implementing this program would be forbidding, even if it somehow proved constitutional. How many links to opposing views would secure the government's approval? The FCC would need an army of media regulators (much as China has today) to monitor the millions of Web pages, blogs, and social-networking sites and keep them in line.

That leftist media critics start sounding so authoritarian is no surprise. In a media cornucopia, freedom of choice inevitably yields media inequality. "In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome," writes Clay Shirky of New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Overcoming that inequality would require a completely regulated media.

When Rush Limbaugh has more listeners than NPR, or Tom Clancy sells more books than Noam Chomsky, or Motor Trend gets more subscribers than Mother Jones, liberals want to convince us (or themselves, perhaps) that it's all because of some catastrophic market failure or a grand corporate conspiracy to dumb down the masses. In reality, it's just the result of consumer choice. All the opinions that the left's media critics favor are now readily available to us via multiple platforms. But that's not good enough, it seems: they won't rest until all of us are watching, reading and listening to the content that they prefer.

Let's get rid of the FCC and privatize the radio spectrum, already...