I fail to see how prohibiting groups of people from spending money on video equipment is any more justifiable than prohibiting them from spending money on a printing press. Were not presses back in 1790 very expensive?
Indeed, the Solicitor General seemed to lose the momentum of the argument right around when one of the justices got him to admit that if the government could ban the airing of the movie (of a non-profit corporation, by the way) that there was no principled way that book banning wouldn't be okay under the same powers.
Which is curious - there were, as far as I know, no restrictions on them putting the exact same ads or films out over the Internet or through any means other than TV broadcasts (which are of course a Government-granted monopoly and therefore can reasonably be argued to need more regulation).
Might've have been a better angle, not necessarily a winning one though. The trend has been to be very skeptical of speech regulations on broadcast, even if it's a government granted monopoly. The 2nd Circuit smacked down the FCC for fining FOX that year for "fleeting expletives".
