Consider by publication year the normalized frequency of “FCC” (U.S. Federal Communications Commission) in the text of a large corpus of books published in the U.S. from 1934 to 2008.[1] While you might think that the communications industry keeps getting more complicated and more contentious, the normalized frequency of FCC references is lower in the 2000s than it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While you might think that the breakup of AT&T in 1984 was a huge policy issues, references to the FCC were falling from the beginning of the 1980s through to the end. References to the FCC started to increase rapidly about 1970 and peaked about 1978. What made the 1970s such interesting years in communications policy?
While more book computing is needed for a definitive answer, I conjecture that cable television’s challenge to broadcast television drove increasing book attention to the FCC in the 1970s. By the mid-1960s, cable television was threatening to bring video competition to local television broadcasters. In orders in 1965 and 1966, the FCC declared its authority over cable television and established “must carry” regulations requiring cable systems to carry local broadcast stations.[2] In 1972, the FCC issued a major Cable Television Report and Order to “open up cable’s potential to serve the public without at the same time undermining the foundation of the existing over-the-air broadcast structure.”[3] Since existing over-the-air broadcasters were central media in the mass public sphere, the FCC’s goal was both politically understandable and quite difficult. The FCC issued extensive, detailed regulations to support that goal. These regulations provided rich fodder for authorial discussion of free speech, media concentration, and political battles both small and large.
When communications regulation has greater effects on a common mass media (television), it will be discussed more in elite mass media (books).
Other posts on corpus word statistics and corpus stylistics:
- traditional news: an academic style
- long-run trend in writing style
- long-run trends in given name frequencies
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[1] The U.S. Congress established the FCC in the Communications Act of 1934. The last year of data in the Google Ngram Viewer is 2008. In the Google Ngram Viewer, the American English corpus refers to a large set of books published in the U.S. I use a minimal amount of smoothing (1 — meaning a three-year moving average) to filter some high-frequency noise while retaining reasonable year resolution.
[2] FCC, First Report and Order, Dockets 14895, 15233, 38 FCC 683 (1965); FCC, Second Report and Order, Dockets 14895, 15233, 15971, 2 FCC 2d. 729 (1966).
[3] FCC, 36th Annual Report, Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1970 (1971) p. 33, cited in William Emmons, “Public Policy and the Evolution of Cable Television: 1950-1990,” Business and Economic History, 2nd Series, v. 22 (1992) pp. 182-191.