Federal Radio Commission - Radio Licensing

Radio Licensing

In the spring of 1928, the commissoners made drastic reallocations and told 164 stations to justify their existence or be forced to stop broadcasting (these hearings came under the title of General Order 32). Many low-powered independent stations were eliminated, although eighty-one stations did survive, most with reduced power. Educational stations fared particularly poorly. They were usually required to share frequencies with commercial stations and operate during the daytime, which was considered worthless for adult education.

KFKB Milford, Kansas, had been renewed several times by the Federal Radio Commission. It was one of the most popular stations in the nation. KFKB was owned by a surgeon, John R. Brinkley, who, among other things, espoused, over the airwaves, implanting slivers of goat testes in men's testicles for "sexual rejuvenation." The American Medical Association was very upset over a program in which he read listener mail describing symptoms, and then prescribed over the air, describing the medication by number. Listeners had to visit a Brinkley "kick back" pharmacy to fill these prescriptions. In 1930 the Federal Radio Commission denied his request for renewal. Brinkley appealed on the grounds of censorship. The U.S. Court of Appeals denied his appeal. The court ruled that the Federal Radio Commission could consider past programming content without it being censorship. This, however, didn't stop the ever-popular Dr. Brinkley, who almost won the governorship of Kansas in 1930 by write-in votes. He simply beamed his programs to the United States over 100,000 watt XER from Villa Acuna, Coah, Mexico. This was twice the power of any broadcast radio station save one experimental 500,000 watt station WLW Cincinnati. Not to be outdone, Brinkley increased his power to 500,000 watts as well, as XERA, and used a curtain-array antenna to focus his signal northward. In 1941, Brinkley suffered from a series of serious medical problems. During his attempt to recuperate from them, he was charged with mail fraud, but died before the case could be tried.

KGEF Los Angeles, California was the second station to lose its license over what it broadcast. Owned by "Battling Bob" Robert P. Shuler (not to be confused with the Robert Schuller of the Crystal Cathedral a generation later), he built his station at Trinity Methodist Church, South, in downtown Los Angeles from a donation from Methodist philanthropist Lizzie Glide, who also funded San Francisco's famous Glide Memorial Church. The station quickly ran afoul of the political interests of a corrupt Los Angeles, who didn't appreciate either Shuler's reactionary politics or his often accurate knowledge of who was being paid off by whom. KGEF v. FRC followed in the footsteps of KFKB v. FRC as the second of the one-two punch that made past programming relevant in license renewals, though the primary reason for the rejection of the license renewal was that Shuler owned the station (because Glide wrote the check to him) but the church held the license.

WNYC, the municipal station of New York City, was assigned a part-time, low-power channel. It appealed and lost. Even though the station was government owned, the Federal Radio Commission said that city ownership did not give the station any special standing concerning the "public interest, convenience, and necessity." This was representative of the decline of public broadcasting.