Saving Red Lion

[Commentary] Last week, television broadcasters told the Supreme Court that the FCC's efforts to enforce US broadcast indecency law are invalid because today's families subscribe to cable and satellite television services and surf the Internet. To make the point clearer: in order to reserve the right to broadcast "dirty" words and the occasional image of a naked female breast when children might be in the audience, broadcasters are challenging the right of the public to demand public interest programming -- educational programming for children, local civic and election affairs, and public safety information. Without public interest obligations, our country's most time-honored broadcast values of competition, diversity, localism and democracy might all be toast.