Blue Book (FCC)

Public Service Responsibility of Broadcast Licensees was a report published in 1946 by the (U.S.) Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which sought to require radio broadcasters in the United States to abide by a number of public service requirements. The report was informally and commonly referred to as the FCC Blue Book because of the report's blue cover.

The Blue Book bound the privilege of holding a lucrative and scarce radio broadcast license to certain public service requirements. The Blue Book specified the requirements and tied failure to meet these obligations to hearings and to the potential revocation of a broadcast license. Such a standard was never before proposed in the annals of the FCC, and hasn't been proposed since.

The Blue Book—and the commissioners and staff at the FCC who wrote, published, and defended it—faced a considerable backlash from commercial broadcasters. The backlash was tied closely to anti-Communist fervor in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. Opponents, in particular the National Association of Broadcasters and the radio industry's leading trade magazine, Broadcasting, decried the Blue Book as Communist-inspired, pro-censorship, and anathema to freedom. Broadcasting’s editorials attacked it for 15 consecutive weeks and were later compiled by NBC president Niles Trammel in a red-covered booklet called “The Red Book Looks at the Blue Book.”

The backlash was ultimately successful. Those staff most closely involved with the Blue Book were driven out of the FCC; none of the Blue Book's policy prescriptions were ever implemented, and no U.S. radio broadcaster ever lost its broadcast license as a result of violating the Blue Book's prescriptions.

Disfavor ran rampant against the state of radio in the 1930s and 1940s. Chief among the complaints: the vulgarity of radio commercials and overcommercialization, the erosion of so-called "sustaining (non-commercial) programs", the influence of advertisers to shape news coverage, and the lax performance of broadcasters to abide by their original obligations towards public service. Emblematic of this sentiment was the highly popular novel The Hucksters (1946), which depicted greedy radio station owners. A later film adaptation of The Hucksters (1947) starred Clark Gable.

This sentiment dovetailed with a progressive current at the FCC, whose chair James Lawrence Fly spearheaded a number of initiatives—among them the 1941 Report on Chain Broadcasting that resulted in the breakup of the NBC radio network and the formation of the ABC radio network. The Supreme Court in its 1943 decision NBC, Inc. v. United States affirmed that FCC had the authority to establish programming objectives.

One subsequent initiative was a formalization of the rules of the social contract between radio broadcasters and the public; that crystallized as the Blue Book, which codified the thinking of the majority of FCC commissioners at the time. The Blue Book was unanimously approved by the commission and published on March 7, 1946.

The Blue Book comprised five parts and was 59 pages long. The five parts are roughly summarized as follows: