The Brinkley Act is the popular name given to . This provision was enacted by the United States Congress to prohibit broadcasting studios in the U.S. from being connected by live telephone line or other means to a transmitter located in Mexico. Prior to World War II, Dr. John R. Brinkley controlled a high-power radio station, XERA, located in Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila, on the U.S.-Mexican border, across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas. The programs on Brinkley's stations originated from studios in the US, which were connected to his transmitters via international telephone lines. Brinkley ran a popular but controversial program offering questionable medical advice to his listeners. Since Brinkley's transmitters were licensed in Mexico, which at the time had very limited regulation of broadcast content, his broadcasting licenses could not be directly threatened by the US government. Dr. Brinkley's activities at his studio were thought to be a local matter, outside Congress's regulatory powers. However, the communications between the studio and his transmitters clearly involved international commerce and were therefore within Congress's power to regulate under the Commerce Clause. The operative language is as follows: The law goes on to state that the legal process for requesting such a permit is the same as that for requesting or renewing a license for a domestic station. Although the original purpose of the Brinkley Act was to shut down a broadcaster, such applications are today granted as a matter of course, and a number of US broadcasters are permitted to program Mexican stations from their US studios in communities such as San Diego, California and Brownsville, Texas, where as many as a third of the stations in each radio market are licensed in Mexico. In recent years the law has returned to prominence, as its provisions have been used to extend US ownership limits to Mexican stations leased by US broadcasters.
Comparable legislation elsewhere
To prevent Radio Luxembourg from beaming a live signal from continental Europe, which had originated in the London studios of the station, to the whole of the United Kingdom, the BritishGeneral Post Office which had control of British telephones, enacted similar regulations. Consequently, Radio Luxembourg, like the Mexican border-blasters, had to either use studios at the station in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, or record information in London on a transcription disc which could then be flown to Luxembourg for replay.
