first-amendment
Does MCAC v Halleck overturn Turner II?
<p><a href="https://scholar.google.de/scholar_case?case=13491097931273768034" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, 139 S. Ct. 1921 (2019)</a> held that MCAC was not a state actor and that it can limit all it wants about who accesses their services and who speaks on them.</p>
<p>However, Turner II aka <a href="https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/118/turner-broadcasting-system-inc-v-federal-communications-commission" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission 520 U.S. 180 (1997)</a> held that there are several things that a (television) broadcasting company has to carry under the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992.</p>
<p>Where is the line that puts both of these verdicts under one hat, where the newer case clearly establishes that a private party can throw anyone out of their networks for speech, while the older case has some content that must be carried?</p>

<p>There is no contradiction. In MCAC, the plaintiff was a private party who claimed MCAC's refusal to carry their program violated their First Amendment rights. In holding that MCAC was not a state actor, the Court didn't hold that MCAC had total unfettered discretion to kick anyone it wants off of its channels. What it held was that <em>the First Amendment</em> doesn't restrict MCAC.</p>
<p>In Turner II, the FCC was not claiming that the First Amendment required Turner to carry anything. Must-carry rules were based on an act of Congress explicitly requiring cable companies to devote some portion of their channels to carrying broadcast stations. The equivalent in MCAC would be if New York had a regulation that would require MCAC to carry the plaintiff's content. As the opinion notes in <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=13491097931273768034#%5B3%5D" rel="nofollow noreferrer">footnote 2</a>, the constitutionality of such a regulation is a separate question. Turner II held that one particular regulation was constitutional: cable operators had to carry local broadcasters. That regulation was content-neutral and so was evaluated under intermediate scrutiny. Other regulations might fail intermediate scrutiny, be evaluated under strict scrutiny, or be entirely forbidden.</p>
