How the FCC Became the Speech Police

THE CONSTITUTIONALLY ANOMALOUS STATUS OF BROADCASTING INVITES GOVERNMENT MEDDLING.

- JACOB SULLUM

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg/Getty

IN 1964, JOURNALIST Fred J. Cook published Barry Goldwater: Extremist of the Right, a 186-page attack on the Republican candidate in that year's presidential election. As economist Thomas W. Hazlett notes in his history of broadcast regulation, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) "arranged for Grove Press to publish the book," which portrayed Goldwater as "so extreme that he cuts a positively ridiculous figure." The general public bought 44,000 copies. The DNC bought 72,000.

Conservative criticism of Cook's book resulted in a landmark Supreme Court decision that upheld federal regulation of broadcast speech—a power that several presidents had used to target their political opponents. Although the Reagan administration repudiated that illiberal tradition, President Donald Trump has revived it, as illustrated by the 2025 suspension of Jimmy Kimmel, the ongoing transformation of CBS News, and Trump's habitual threats against TV stations that air news coverage he views as unfair or unbalanced.

The Supreme Court blessed the legal rationale for such meddling in a case that started with a right-wing evangelist's reaction to Cook's critique of Goldwater. A few weeks after Goldwater lost to President Lyndon B. Johnson in a historic landslide, Billy James Hargis railed against Cook during his Christian Crusade radio show.

The man who “wrote the book to smear and destroy Barry Goldwater,” Hargis said, was “a professional mudslinger” who had defended accused Soviet spy Alger Hiss in The Nation. Hargis called that magazine “one of the most scurrilous publications of the left,” saying it had “championed many communist causes over many years.” Hargis also noted that Cook “was fired from the New York World-Telegram