Who speaks for the listener?

Reason reports that the FCC is pursuing a rule change that would permit broader consolidation among broadcast owners — and that it is not even certain the agency holds the legal authority to make that change. The outlet's own lead offers reassurance: little to worry about. I confess that phrase, applied to any relaxation of the check on concentrated ownership, is precisely the kind of reassurance I have learned to distrust most.

The logic of consolidation is always presented to the public as efficiency. Fewer owners, the argument runs, means lower costs, and lower costs mean better service. This is, in narrow accounting terms, sometimes true. In the pin factory I described many years ago, the division of labor allowed ten men to produce what one could not produce in a year. But the pin factory produced pins for sale to many buyers. A broadcast market consolidated into a handful of owners does not produce for sale to many buyers in any meaningful sense — it produces for sale to advertisers, while the listener or viewer becomes the product. The consumer's interest, which is the final purpose of every commercial arrangement, recedes from view entirely.

The deeper question Reason raises — whether the FCC possesses the lawful authority to make this change — is, from my perspective, the more important one. I have never argued that markets require no regulation; I have argued the opposite. Markets require an institutional framework: contract law, property rights, honest courts, and rules that prevent any single merchant or combination of merchants from raising their gain at the public's expense. When an agency acts at the outer edge of its mandate, or beyond it, the institutional framework itself is weakened. A rule made without clear legal authority is a rule that will be litigated, reversed, and replaced by uncertainty — which serves no one, least of all the honest broadcaster trying to plan a business.

There is a pattern I recognized in my own time and which, by inference, persists in yours: the large interest finds it easier than the small one to attend the regulator. The East India Company did not need to bribe Parliament on every occasion; it merely needed to be present, to be available for consultation, to have men in the right rooms. I would wager — though I mark this as inference, not recollection — that the broadcasters best positioned to benefit from this rule change are the very ones whose representatives are most fluent in the language of the agency that is loosening the restriction.

The proper question, then, is not whether consolidation produces short-run efficiencies. It is whether the institutional check that remains after consolidation is sufficient to discipline the consolidated interest in the public's favor. Who enforces the obligation to serve the community of license? Who ensures that local news — the kind of news that holds a city council or a county sheriff to account — survives when the owner's headquarters is three time zones away and the margin on local reporting is thin? These are questions of institutional design, and they deserve a more searching answer than little to worry about.

Free exchange under the rule of law is my creed. But the rule of law comes first. An agency acting beyond its authority, loosening a constraint on concentrated ownership, does not advance free exchange — it advances the interest of the few at the expense of the many who depend on an honest, plural, competitive press. That is not the invisible hand at work. It is the visible hand of the well-organized interest, resting quietly on the regulator's shoulder.