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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 07/04
An Economic Theory of Censorship
J. Gregory Sidak
September 2003
The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Abstract
Broadcast regulation can exploit sunk costs as a means of exerting control over the content of broadcast speech—to compel favored speech and to suppress disfavored speech. One conspicuous FCC policy that manifests rent extraction is the newspaper-television cross—ownership prohibition. A rent-extraction model of broadcast regulation shows how such seemingly “structural” regulation can facilitate the government’s influence over broadcast content and, indeed, why it is advantageous for the FCC consciously to embed methods of influencing broadcast content within regulations that are likely to be subjected to lessened degrees of judicial scrutiny.
