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.^[1] 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.^[2]

The Blue Book—and the commissioners and staff at the FCC who wrote, published, and defended it—faced a considerable backlash from commercial broadcasters.^[3] 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.”^[4]

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.