Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission

In the 1970s, the FCC (defendant) established policies that granted ownership preferences to minorities to address the lack of minority ownership of television stations. The FCC took this action in response to the fact that no American television stations were owned by African Americans or by any other racial minority. The FCC’s policy dealt with underrepresentation by providing a comparative advantage to minorities in relation to new licenses and established a distressed-sale program by which troubled licensees reaped certain benefits by selling their stations to minorities at discounted rates. The FCC had identified the barriers to market entry by minorities as lack of capital, lack of information regarding the availability of licenses, and lack of experience in the broadcasting field, all resulting from past inequities. The FCC’s policies were meant to target these barriers. The FCC’s main interest was broadcast diversity in programming. The FCC believed that the public, at large, was served by a diversity of viewpoints in programming. Therefore, the preferential programs were not meant to remedy some past discrimination, which the FCC did not feel it had committed, but rather to serve the important objective of broadcast diversity. The FCC viewed policies that increased this diversity as serving this goal. In fact, it also gave preferential treatment to local applicants, for example, reasoning that local applicants would produce content regarding local communities, thereby further increasing the diversity of viewpoints. The FCC did not pursue preferential-minority policies until after experience revealed that race-neutral means had not helped it to achieve its objective of benefiting the public through programming diversity. The FCC reviewed its policies in multiple years and determined that an empirical nexus existed between diversity in broadcasting and minority ownership of television stations. Congress also supported the policies. By 1978, out of 8,500 stations, 40 were minority-owned. Challengers who felt discriminated against in their ability to obtain a new license for a television station, like Metro Broadcasting, Inc. (plaintiff) and Shurberg Broadcasting of Hartford, filed suit. The cases were consolidated for Supreme Court review of these affirmative-action policies in the context of granting licenses for ownership of television stations.