The Hoosier Pundit has a post entitled Fairness Doctrine, Redux. He mentions Democratic attempts to bring the Fairness Doctrine back to radio. The Fairness Doctrine was a regulation of the FCC which required broadcast licensees “to present controversial issues of public importance, and to present such issues in what was deemed an honest, equal and balanced manner. It has since been repealed by the FCC and aspects of it have been questioned by courts.”
After the Fairness Doctrine was rolled back, we saw an explosion of conservative talk radio — Limbaugh, et al.
The Hoosier Pundit says:
Talk radio, they say, is unfairly dominated by conservatives.
Something about the free market not producing a result that is not politically suitable to their anti-free-market ideology, I guess.
What I want to know, though, is whether this “Fairness Doctrine” can be made to also apply to the Internet.
I have mixed feelings about the Fairness Doctrine generally, but the Hoosier Pundit’s critiques are addressed easily enough:
1. Radio broadcasts are not done in a free market. Want to test this? Fire up your transmitter to broadcast on an AM frequency and see what happens. I’ll bet you a corporation goes to the government court and asks it to enforce the government issued license by, if necessary to stop you from competing on that frequency, sending the government paid police to lock you in the government run jails. Because frequencies are limited, the government sells licenses to the public airwaves. That means only government sanctioned owners — usually those rich enough to afford a license — get to speak over the public airwaves.
2. No fairness doctrine for the Internet — there is nothing like frequency scarcity on the Internet, so the FCC doesn’t get to regulate the speech that goes over it. (At least that’s my hope — sometimes the scarcity doctrine that permits government regulation of broadcasts seems more like a pretext for regulation and not the real reason.)
Fire up a “pirate” radio station and you won’t have to wait for a corporation to take you to court. The FCC actively polices the airwaves for non-licensed stations.
Considering the ability to set up websites with “radio” like formats and the ability to use cell phones/portable computers to access the net in a wireless fashion seems to reduce the need for “fairness”, especially in large markets. The doctrine might still be useful in small town/rural markets.
Pirate stations had a certain popularity in Europe. As I recall a prominent one set up on an unused WWII air defense platform in International Waters in the North Sea.
Let’s be careful with ‘fairness doctrine’ ‘Fairness’ means regulated by someone’s agenda,and in our times that most likely means by big money and big power.An example of regulation gone mad is sports broadcast regulation and access.(it seems you can only watch sports free you don’t want to see)Just make sure NPR remains accessible to everyone and is left alone to be run by ‘a bunch of liberals'( as the conservatives characterize it)and let AM radio be the domain of the rabid right.I drive a great deal and I can choose Rush( or the like) or NPR or the local swap shop or Country Music.That’s fine.There’re also CDs
Like I said, I have issues with the “Fairness Doctrine” generally, just not the same issues that the Hoosier Pundit seems to have.
I think what we’ve seen with radio is that the barriers to entry are fairly high so, as a general rule, you are not going to get a lot of talk that is particularly adverse to the folks who own the licenses.
At the moment, the Internet is wildly diverse in terms of speech you can find there. To keep it that way, I think we have to pay attention to Net Neutrality. If the owners of the Internet tubes get to provide good speed and reliability to owners of certain bits of information and crappy speed and reliability to other owners, we could see the rise of another pay-to-play communication environment.
I do not listen to talk radio but it would seem to me the market would dictate what is successful.
I would like to thank talk radio though along with Lou Dobbs,numbersusa,Glen Beck,grassfire.org,Michelle Malkin.com,Hot Air.com.NRO online and the millions of Americans who helped kill the immigration bill!
The calls were coming in at such a furious pace yesterday morning the Capitol Hill phone system crashed and earlier in the week the Senate internet server crashed as citizens were contacting Senators to oppose what was being called one of the worst pieces of legislation in many years.
Numbersusa is now around 500,000 members strong and growing and has over 1100 members in each of Indiana’s congressional districts.Faxes,emails,and calls flooded in and not just from Republicans either.Several from our local community got involved.
The tactics used by Bush(I can not even refer to this pathetic individual as president anymore)Minority leader McConnel and his whip Trent I am a arrogant SOB Lott,and Majority Leader Reid was the most underhanded dirty non Democratic way to pursue legislation ever seen.This bill was still being changed and fooled with behind closed doors this week,Reids CLAY Pigeon tactic was shot down the night before the big vote leaving him as he stated STUCK because one of the limited amendments failed to be defeated by The Grand Bargainers.
Writng legisaltion out of the committee process limiting debate and trying to ram it down the throats of the American people doesn’t cut it!For those that want a amnesty legalization or whatever you want to call it secure the borders first and no this bill would not have done that.We found out that in the new amendment dropped on us at the last minute some of the $4.4 billion bribe by Bush for border security could have actually been used for implementing the Z visa program.
If a government can not process a security system for 3 million passports it is rediculous to think they will process 12-20 million people with 24hr background checks.
THANK YOU Senator Bayh for finally listening to Hoosiers and voting to kill this bill Tuesday and Thursday.Shame on Lugar!
I apologize for getting off topic to those who are reading this but this was a important situation that happened yesterday,far more than what Paris Hilton is or isn’t going to do.
The refrain “Not my president” is getting pretty popular lately. Used to be such a statement was borderline treasonous.
Talk radio bothers me not one bit. Cumbersome mega-corporations limiting the type of product that is available usually comes back to shoot them in the foot. The lack of choice in talk radio reminds me of Henry Ford saying you can have any color car you want, as long as it’s black. That leads to others stepping up as the internet has since there is less resistance to starting up there. The radio behemoths can keep their current format and keep selling commercial time to the Sleep Number Bed, fake hair-growth tonics like Advicor, and who knows what else they peddle, while a large chunk of the buying public tunes out completely. Nice business model.
Make that “Avacor”. Advicor is an actual medication. Avacor, a fake tonic with a sound-alike name.
T sez: while a large chunk of the buying public tunes out completely. Nice business model.
Safe to say you weren’t a marketing major, huh?
While I wasn’t expecting my tongue-in-cheek post to be taken quite so seriously (you didn’t quote that part), it is worth noting that the government does have the potential power to regulate the Internet if it wishes to do so.
It could do this not merely through net neutrality and other lobbyist-created artifices, but through other methods such as its “indirect” control over the issuing of domain names, to say nothing of the giant opening created by commerce clause and the broad interpretation of it by Congress and the Courts in recent history.
And that is before you get into what it could do by delving into regulating the pipelines themselves, along with routing servers and so forth.
It is a slippery slope.
I do not think that there is much of a chance for the return of the fairness doctrine (or its application for the internet), regardless of the hopes of those who have been bruised (left and right) by talk radio and now seek to shield themselves by bringing it back.
It would have to clear the House, which is by no means certain when the House is voting for things like the Pence amendment and other legislation to prevent it from returning.
It would have to clear the Senate. Can you say filibuster? Sure, I knew you could.
It would have to be signed by a President (not happening right now, at least).
It could be done via the FCC itself under a new administration without Congress, but given the willingness of even this Congress to vote against that sort of thing, I find that unlikely.
FCC back-door implementation is possible but politically hazardous. If it was politically viable as an option, Clinton would probably have attempted it when talk radio was keelhauling him in the 1990s.
And if you got a Democratic president that tried to restore it (whether through the back or via Congress), it would probably be perceived as the most significant move to silence the speech of political critics since the Alien and Sedition Acts.
Whether by the FCC itself or by act of Congress, it is thus likely to run afoul of Miami Herald v. Tornillo, particularly with the Roberts court.