Submitted to Baptist Church News by Lee Peoples Cumming, GA

Madalyn Murray O'Hair vs. Religious Broadcasting

The rumor that the FCC has before it a proposal to deny licenses to
religious broadcasters still continues to circulate, 25 years after the
Commission denied that request.
Federal Communications Commission I don't think it's going to
die out or ever be debunked successfully. No matter how hard we try to
debunk it, there will be people who haven't seen it and will help spread
the rumor the next time around.
Jan Harold Brunvand, Folklorist

Dateline: 05/05/99
Updated: 09/01/00 By David Emery A quarter of a century ago, two broadcasters
petitioned the FCC to consider disqualifying religious organizations from
being licensed to broadcast on channels reserved for noncommercial
educational use. Eight months later, citing the First Amendment requirement
"to observe a stance of neutrality toward religion, acting neither to promote
nor to inhibit religion," the Commission rejected the petition. That ought to
have been the end of it. Unfortunately, wildly inaccurate rumors had already
surfaced among religious groups to the effect that the petition was
instigated by the infamous atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair and called for a ban
on all religious programming. By the time the FCC announced its August 1,
1975 ruling, it had received an estimated 700,000 letters of protest from
people who misunderstood both the origin and the nature of the petition. In
spite of the Commission's best efforts to correct these misunderstandings,
they persisted well beyond that date. In fact, they persist to this very day.
One reason they're still with us is that during the height of the 1975
hysteria, a counter-petition codifying the false information was drawn up and
circulated to "concerned Christians" everywhere. Nothing gives a rumor
staying power like the printed word. From snail mail to fax to email, all
available means have been used to keep the document in constant circulation
ever since. A recent example of the email petition follows (analysis on next
page). Please note that as of 1999, a variant is circulating that begins with
the words: "CBS will be forced to discontinue 'Touched By An Angel' for using
the word 'God' in every program."

"O'HAIR VS. RELIGIOUS BROADCASTING"

What it lacks in accuracy, the petition more than makes up for in religious
and patriotic fervor. As one would expect in a text that has been copied and
re-copied so many times over by people who have no idea what the facts really
are, this recent version features some odd and anomalous details along with
the standard falsehoods:
It not only erroneously attributes the original FCC petition (already
defeated in 1975) to the atheist O'Hair, it goes on to claim (again, falsely)
that the proposal was to ban all religious material from schools and airwaves
– even Christmas carols

Though the content and origin of the 1974 petition are thus completely
misrepresented, the docket number assigned to it at that time by the FCC
("RM-2493") has somehow survived intact all the way down to this latest
version of the counter-petition

Versions of the same text circulated two decades ago claimed that the
petition supposedly presented by O'Hair to the FCC bore the signatures of
27,000 anti-religious backers. That number, already fictional at the time,
has now been mysteriously upgraded to 287,000

We are told that 1 million signatures are needed to "defeat Ms. O'Hare [sic]"
– a number evidently pulled out of a hat. There's a special irony to this: to
date, the FCC has already recorded no fewer than 25 million protests
regarding this nonexistent issue

http://urbanlegends.about.com/science/urbanlegends/library/weekly/aa050599.htm

This document is saved at
http://www.fcc.gov/mmb/asd/decdoc/letter/1975--08--13--religious.html FCC
75-946 RM-2493
The rumor that the FCC has before it a proposal to deny licenses to religious
broadcasters still continues to circulate, 25 years after the Commission
denied that request. The FCC's policy toward religious broadcasters remains
unchanged in that no special provisions or restrictions are applied to
religious stations or licensees, nor are any changes to that policy
contemplated. The following document contains excerpts from the 1975
proceeding on the subject of religious broadcasting. The whole document is
not presented here since the ownership rules specified in 1975 for radio
broadcast stations have since been changed.

[ 54 FCC 2d 941 ] FCC 75-946