History does not repeat itself, but it occasionally rhymes. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr’s latest broadcast market interventions rhyme much more closely with Franklin Roosevelt’s view of government than with Ronald Reagan’s. This should raise alarms, or as Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) summed it up last week, “Sometimes the FCC scares me right now.” 

Progressives lionize FDR as a master of radio whose fireside chats allowed him to bypass a hostile press. But a more accurate history would also recall his administration exploiting regulatory power over radio broadcasters to make the airwaves more favorable to Roosevelt and the New Deal.

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As historian David T. Beito recounts in the New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights, broadcasters occupied an unusually vulnerable position. Newspapers did not need federal permission to publish, but radio stations depended on government licenses to remain on the air.

In the FCC’s early years, licenses were renewed for periods as short as six months, leaving broadcasters in nearly continuous regulatory uncertainty. A station considering whether to criticize the........

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