Tracing consequences both seen and unseen.
Sarah BrodskyHow the FCC Encourages Religious Discrimination
Posted at 1:15 pm on November 1, 2010, by Sarah Brodsky

Radio Station

A friend of mine recently applied for an off-air position at a radio station. The interview went well–until they asked if he were a Christian. When he said he wasn’t, they responded that they were sorry, but they were running a Christian talk station and they could only hire Christians. They said that they had to have this policy in order to comply with FCC regulations.

That seemed pretty bizarre. I could understand a Christian station wanting to hire people with similar beliefs, but what did the FCC have to do with it? Then I looked up the FCC’s Equal Employment Opportunities regulations. The FCC requires stations to do a lot of things to avoid discrimination in recruitment. They have to participate in job fairs, sponsor job fairs, host job fairs, offer internships, or take other actions that have been approved by the FCC. All of those measures impose some costs on stations. However, a religious station need not take these steps to recruit for an open position if it makes religious belief a qualification for the position. So to keep their recruitment costs down, Christian stations bar non-Christians from employment. Rules that were supposed to prevent discrimination are actually causing stations to discriminate.

The religious discrimination might even out, so to speak, if there were equal numbers of stations affiliated with many different creeds. But of course, the vast majority of religious radio stations are Christian. There are very few Muslim stations or Jewish stations; I’ve come across online Buddhist broadcasts, but no brick-and-mortar Buddhist stations. And I haven’t found any atheist radio stations, although there are individual shows dedicated to atheist ideas. A Christian who wants to work in radio likely won’t miss out on any opportunities, but a Muslim or an atheist will be passed over when religious stations are hiring.

Would that happen even if the FCC didn’t impose these regulations? Not necessarily. I’d expect Christian stations to exclusively hire Christian for on-air positions. And probably they would want only Christians to write content for religious shows. But there are other jobs, like board operator or call screener, that people with different beliefs could still perform competently. Religious stations might hire people of other faiths for those roles, if the FCC didn’t give them an incentive to discriminate.


Filed under: Regulation, Religious Freedom, Technology, Unintended Consequences
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Henry Hazlitt"[T]he whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."
Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson
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