Equal Time in an Unequal Media Environment

The Libertarian

The Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin

History, News, Politics

4.7 • 994 Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2026

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Richard Epstein unpacks what the equal time rule actually is, where it came from, and why it still applies to broadcast television decades after the demise of the Fairness Doctrine. He also explores the original justification for FCC regulation based on spectrum scarcity, the uneasy relationship between free speech and campaign finance law, and whether the logic behind these rules makes any sense in a world of YouTube, podcasts, and limitless media platforms

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Libertarian. I'm Charles C.W. Cook, and I'm here, of course, with the libertarian himself, Richard Epstein.
0:20.9	Richard, welcome to your own show.
0:22.6	It's always nice to be welcomed by you, Charlie.
0:24.9	And this is a production of the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.
0:32.4	All right, we have another FCC case, another FCC brew ha-ha-ha. This time over the equal time rule, Stephen Colbert has a show on CBS,
0:47.1	made a big stink saying that he'd been warned by his lawyers that he couldn't have a Democratic candidate for Senate on his show because
1:00.0	Trump's dastardly FCC wanted to invoke the equal time rule. There was some pushback,
1:09.0	including from CBS. CBS said, no, no, the equal time rule is a real thing.
1:13.6	We advised you that if you had one candidate on, his name is James Talariko,
1:20.8	then you would have to have the other candidate on, Jasmine Crockett, and any other candidates on,
1:30.6	if they requested it. There's a bit of a fight over who's telling the truth, but the bigger question is, what on earth is the equal time
1:37.6	rule? And since when has this been a feature of American law, Richard? Well, I mean, look, it's important in this sort to remember the fact that the FCC, which regulated frequencies, was from its inception, are working in a very different area, where, in fact, there was limited capacity on the spectrum.
1:58.9	And there were two ways in which you could operate it.
2:02.1	One was proposed by Ronald Koss in his 1959 article in the FCC.
2:07.8	And what it proposed was that you just auction off the frequencies.
2:12.0	And if there's a relative scarcity, then the price will start to increase.
2:16.3	As the capacity of any given bandwidth starts to increase, the price will start to increase. As the capacity of any given bandwidth starts to increase,
2:20.0	the price will start to go down. And what happens if you follow that particular approach,
2:25.1	there's no particular reason whatsoever to have any government involvement in what's going on in the
2:30.4	area. The frequencies are out there. If they're treated as ordinary property rights,
2:35.8	if one candidate wants to get on for a long period of time, they find the right station and pay them.
2:41.6	If the other candidate wants to do something else, they could pay at a different station and so
	...

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