Promoting Diversity
There are now many regulations involved with an end role of trying to promote diversity in media industries, in a way to introduce a sense of equality in the media world. This is all due to the fact that the wealthy and privileged social groups have the upper hand when it comes to media industries, therefore these regulations insure that the minority viewpoints and perspectives are still known and heard on the television and radio. Ott and Mack discuss two very important and well-known rules that had came into the media industry to help make it fairer to everyone. The first being the “Fairness Doctrine”, it was established in 1949 and it was an FCC policy that strongly advocated broadcasting stations to promote both sides of controversial issues and fairly represent both sides of the issue to viewers. However this was said to promote the fact that both sides are good, when in all actuality sometimes that is not at all true. Therefore the FCC decided to revoke the policy in 1987 as a consequence of “free-market” logic and deregulation. The Second example that they talked about was the “equal 
time rule,” in which is still in use to this day. This rule clearly outlines how stations must handle the broadcast of political parties and their advertisements. Television and radio stations may not refuse airtime to paying political parties and they also must charge them the lowest rate as they would charge other advertisers. They also must charge all candidates equally; if a station should choose to give free advertising to one candidate they must do so for all of the others as well. For example when Arnold Schwarzenegger was in the 2003 race for Governor, broadcast televisions were prohibited from showing any of his movies under the equal time rule. If they did show one of his films then they risked having to give the same amount of time to the other 134 candidates.
Managing Morality
There are three key types of regulated media content that Ott and Mack talk about, obscenity, profanity, and indecency. Obscenity has always been a difficult word to define, however we know it to be content that is sexually explicit in nature, strongly based on the culture that is watching the material. In the 1973 court case, Miller vs California it was determined that content is considered to be obscene when; it meets the following three standards. 1) The average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest; 2) the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable
state law; and 3) the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Profanity on the other hand is simply defined as any language spoken in a vulgar manner. Which goes along with indecency, any material that is morally unfit for general distribution or broadcast, in which it most usually depicts some form of sexual behavior as well. The book talks about South Park and how it is rated very high for all three regulations such as, extreme for violence, strong for language, and strong for sexual situations. Therefore it is forced to be shown only on certain channels.
Ensuring Accuracy
Regulations intended at ensuring accuracy tend to deal primarily with news broadcast and print industries. Basically these regulations are used to insure that people are being told the truth about what is going on in our country. The most important regulations are the two twin legal concepts, slander, and libel. Slander is to make false and damaging statements about someone. Libel is when someone publishes false statements that is damaging to a person’s reputation, a written defamation. Neither is protected under the freedom of speech. However looking at these both from a pragmatic outlook they are very helpful and effective.
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