ABSTRACT
The regulation of the new electronic media of the 20th century – radio and television – confirmed that press freedom was effectively limited to journalism in print. Born of military technology, the mass-medium of radio was highly regulated by the state, as it had to be, because broadcasting depended on the limited range of frequencies which could be allocated for signal transmission. This did not, of course, necessitate control of content. However, in line with the censorship imposed on theatre, and later, cinema, such interference was legitimated and, in time, used to regulate television as well. The control of commercially-funded broadcasting systems (following the American model), or of publicly-funded systems (as in the UK), was legally mandated, but normally operated internally, through the broadcasters’ own compliance offices. This preserved the appearance of free expression (as, say, guaranteed by the American Constitution). The result has been that, in the Anglosphere at least, the archive of totally faked broadcasts is virtually empty. But the cost of constraining free expression to obtain this outcome has been that broadcasting’s ability to speak truth to power has been blunted. Meanwhile the printed press has continued to fabricate, albeit still with commendable rarity, fiction, grounded in reality, masquerading as news.
