Are there any FCC regulations regarding censorship that public access stations, cities, or cable operators must follow?
No. In the 1984 Cable Act Congress specifically prohibited cable operators from “exercising any editorial control over any video programming provided” on any access channel, supporting the fact that access channels are a public forum. Cities and public access stations have followed suit. Sections of the Telecommunications Act of 1992 attempted to give censorship control back to the cable operators for indecent programming, but in June of 1996, the Supreme Court struck down those sections sighting that indecent speech is protected under the First Amendment and cannot be censored. In 1973 (Miller V. California) the United States Supreme Court developed a three-part test to define obscenity, which is not protected by the First Amendment. Under this test an access station could prohibit programming considered obscene, but the Supreme Court’s definition is extremely broad and access channels have generally had difficulty applying the three-part test. In turn, many access stations do not att
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