End the Subsidy for Commercial Broadcasters?

House Republicans are proposing to end the subsidy to public broadcasters purportedly as a deficit cutting measure. If they were serious about that and if it were not an ideologically motivated exercise, Republicans should jump at the chance to eliminate the much larger subsidy for commercial broadcasters. Both commercial and public broadcasters are permitted to use the frequencies for free. In the case of commercial broadcasters, this is a massive giveaway because they can and do charge advertisers for access to the frequencies. Commercial broadcasters are even permitted to sell the frequencies they have received for free. I recall many years ago a station in a major city being sold for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Why don't we end this free use of the public airwaves? Why don't we charge broadcasters before we give them a license to gobble up money? The theory used to be that these broadcasters were licensed to be public trustees. In practice, with deregulation, commercial broadcasters are trustees for commercial advertisers. There is a name for a system in which commercial broadcasters collectively are given this subsidy (a subsidy worth tens of billions of dollars): it's called corruption.