In the early decades of the twenty-first century, old problems afflict new media. Once again, America anguishes over the diminished democratic promise of its communication technologies. Like broadcasting in the 1940s, digital media have become dominated by oligopolies driven by a corporate libertarian logic at odds with public interest principles. Recent scholarship has linked these ownership structures to various shortcomings with American broadband, including disparities among communities and socioeconomic groups in terms of speeds and access, costs for service, and impediments to free-flowing information and content. Just as radio’s full democratic potential was thwarted by commercial capture in the 1930s and 1940s, a similar fate faces the Internet today. This crisis in digital media coincides with the gradual collapse of journalism’s last major institutional bastion: newspapers. Commercial journalism’s contradictions were left unresolved in the 1940s, only to erupt in crisis once again in our present times. Now, as then, the newspaper industry faces a structural crisis and intense public scrutiny. However, unlike the 1940s crisis, the one today is likely a mortal blow to the industry, and rebranding self-regulatory measures as “social responsibility” will not save it this time.

The 1940s media policy debates are instructive for policy makers as they confront these crises. These earlier debates, to varying degrees, all focused on buffering media’s public service mission from undue market pressures. And nearly all of them were resolved in ways that aligned with a corporate libertarian logic that benefited commercial broadcasters and publishers. The 1940s saw a discursive narrowing of possibilities for meaningful public interest requirements and noncommercial alternatives. Similar parameters are at work in today’s policy discourse.