ABSTRACT
The battle over the repeal of the financial interest and syndication rules began in the late 1970s. It pitted the broadcast networks and their affiliates against independent producers, independent television stations, and the MPAA among others. Ten years after the rules were enacted, the television landscape had changed, and the networks began to argue that they were being unfairly crippled by the FCC regulations. The FCC itself began to move toward repealing the rules. In October 1980, an exhaustive study commissioned by the FCC, the Network Inquiry Special Study, “concluded that ‘the financial interest and syndication rules can only be characterized as misguided at best’” (Colvin, 1983, p. 120). The Federal Communications Commission had been on a deregulation trend since the Carter Administration in the late 1970s. Many of the regulations that had been created by Presidents Johnson and Nixon in the early 1960s and 1970s were eliminated less than a decade later. The deregulation trend continued in the 1980s, fueled by Reagonomics. Mark Fowler was the chair of the FCC. To call Mark Fowler a staunch supporter of deregulation is to underplay just how passionate he was about this ideology. The Justice Department consent decrees, which had been left hanging since the early 1970s, were completed by 1980. With the occurrence of these events, the networks had added motivation and saw an opportunity to get the rules repealed and began lobbying toward that end. Thus the stage was set for one of the most divisive debates in recent entertainment and FCC history, pitting television executives against television producers, government departments against the president, and the FCC against Congress.
