If your goal is more competition in the marketplace of ideas, then licensing should be the last thing you should want to advocate. Government licensing limits competition. The only role the government legitimately has is to enforce the frequency boundaries (i.e. if radio station A decides to broadcast on radio station B’s frequency, station B would have grounds to take station A to court). Clear Channel, Westwood One, or any of these other media companies are under no obligation to serve the “public interest” if you truly believe in the First Amendment. The only interest these companies should be required to serve is their own (which would require satisfying the shareholders, advertisers, and the listeners). If the free market does not respond well to the programming, the programming goes away.

There is nothing in the First Amendment which prevents the Government from requiring a licensee to share his frequency with others of his community and present those views which would otherwise, by necessity, be barred.

I disagree but if the First Amendment isn’t good enough for you then how about taking a look at the Ninth and Tenth Amendments:

Ninth Amendment
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Tenth Amendment
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Where in the Constitution does it say that the federal government can regulate broadcasting? I’ll save you some time: it doesn’t!

This isn’t the independent press that our forefathers spoke of. The answer is to set policies that put the powerful voices of the media in the hands of as many as are possible. A plethora of voices equals a plethora of opinions.
. A license permits broadcasting, but the licensee has no constitutional right to be the one who holds the license or to monopolize a radio frequency to the exclusion of his fellow citizens. There is nothing in the First Amendment which prevents the Government from requiring a licensee to share his frequency with others of his community and present those views which would otherwise, by necessity, be barred from the airwaves

No one has a First Amendment right to monopolize a broadcast frequency. Unlike newspaper owners, every broadcaster knows going in that his ability to pursue his private interests are constrained by the obligation to serve the public

And we should not be deterred in this critical task by those who would use specious constitutional arguments

The real factor at work here is demographics. It appears that conservatives like to listen to the radio, while major newspapers seem to be patronized more by liberals. I suspect that the blogosphere is more heavily populated by liberals than by conservatives, based on the numbers I have seen for traffic and activity at the top political blogs. Whatever the actual numbers are, the only thing we need to be careful about is to insure that every significant faction gets a change to present its views somewhere. So long as that minimum level of coverage is provided — and I think it is — then we needn’t get all worked up about local imbalances.