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Hello, COMM122 podcast listeners. As we wrap up the topic of media mandate from previous weeks, we will now start a new series on media regulations.You are no stranger to media regulations. If you follow the news about e-cigarettes, you might have heard of a call to ban the advertising of e-cigarettes on television. This call came after numerous reports of vaping-related deaths. Another recent case is the talk of breaking up big tech because big tech companies become overly influential. There are also conversations on regulating fake news and foreign interference on social media platforms.Well, First of all, Regulations are various rules, standards, and norms set by governments, legislative bodies, and non-government entities. You might think that regulations are all enforced by governments. Well, many regulations are indeed enacted by governments following laws passed by Congress. We call this formal regulation. An example is the ban on the advertising of tobacco products. There is also informal regulation, also called, self-regulation. An example is movie ratings. Movie ratings are not enforced by the US government, but by the Motion Picture Association of America, which is an non-government organization. Regulations could target content produced by media outlets, or something not directly related to content, such as media ownership, licensing, who has access to the media, and etc.If you feel the information is overwhelming, don’t worry, we will go over each of the common types of regulation, with examples. Before we do that, let’s review four milestones of media-related legislation in the US history. First, the Radio Act of 1912. This is a federal law that went into effect in 1912, not long after the sinking of the Titanic. We mentioned it briefly in the last episdoe. The Radio Act of 1912 is the first legislation targeting radio technology. It requires that anyone transmitting signals through radio-waves needs a license. Before this legislation, public airwaves were the wild west. Everyone, including amateurs, commercial operators and US Navy officers can send signals. This created inference issues as someone may inadvertently or intentionally send fake distress calls. At the time of the Radio Act of 1912, radio was used mostly as one-to-one wireless communication. So the radio act in 1912 is not applicable to broadcasting radio stations. The legislation targeting radio broadcasting came later in the Radio Act of 1927. The 1927 act was proposed again to address the interference issue. But this time, the inference issue was caused by broadcasting radio stations. In our community, you can listen to the local NPR station broadcasts on FM88.5. Can you imagine what will happen if a nearby station tries to broadcast using the same frequency? Yes, it will jam the signal from the NPR station. This is basically what typically happened before the Radio Act of 1927. So the Radio Act of 1927 created the Federal Radio Commission, a government body. It gives FRC the authority to allocate frequencies to stations and individuals, following the Guiding Standard: Public Interest, convenience, or necessity. However, Congress failed to define precisely what it meant by “public interest, convenience, and necessity” in either the statutory text or legislative history. The Radio Act of 1927 ushered in the golden age of radio with inferences died down. As radio stations began to broadcast nationally. A common popular culture emerged based on the common consumption of radio shows. Following the radio act of 1927, Congress passed the Communications Act of 1934. It expanded the regulation to telephone communication, an new invention at that time. It creates FCC, Federal Communication Commission, which is still functioning today. Communications Act of 1934 also set the commercial media mandate as the de facto media mandate for the country. If you want to learn more about