The Fairness Doctrine

[Briareos]

Argh another liberal is pushing to bring back the fairness doctrine so they can silence conservative voices on the radio and on tv. I don't wana hear a damn word from anyone who says they hate censorship yet they approve of this. Well your thoughts?

[matterconsumer]

I consider Rush to be self-nullifying...but he's got an audience...

Whether it's agreement or some sense of masochism the talk radio voices are partisan enough that one has to know what one is getting into... You agree or disagree and move on.

Fairness has nothing to do with whether the audience is there or not. If millions want to listen to Al Franken then they will...

Of course there are the public broadcast stations which I suspect have the greatest chunk of listeners who are concerned with "fairness"...

If you're listening to NPR though it's going to be difficult to listen to a liberal talk show host at the same time...

[Crowley]

Well here's the thing... Neocons tend to be for big business... Big business tends to own radio stations.

So it's not a free speech issue, it's an equal airtime issue.

[matterconsumer]

What about the public broadcast stations? Conservatives hardly get equal time there...It's not as though they can show up and say well we want 50% airtime...

Having said this it's a business...if a liberal commentator were attracting a large audience then there would be a home in radio land for that commentator.

[Spackling Compound]

What about the public broadcast stations? Conservatives hardly get equal time there...It's not as though they can show up and say well we want 50% airtime...

Having said this it's a business...if a liberal commentator were attracting a large audience then there would be a home in radio land for that commentator.
Liberals don't translate to talk radio as well as neo-cons or cons or whatever you call the conservatives these days. Liberals, in radio and other media, do better when they produce the television programs, greenlight the movies and write 99.9% of the songs that get put on the radio.

You can only listen to Michael Savage once a day, you can listen to Green Day's CD all day long.

[Briareos]

Its really about silenceing Hannity and Limbaugh and such. Most people look for a format not a particuler show. So they are more likely to not listen to a station at all if a good chunk of its time is devoted to something that person doesn't care about. So its more cost effect for a station to run say a all gardening and home talk shows if they had to run Sean Hannity in the morning who gets millions of listeners and say Air America in the afternoon where in New York they are ranked 24th lower then the all Carribean music station they replaced. This isn't about equal time or fairness or anything of the sort its purely about a liberal monopoly on the media.

[Melbourne Mew Mew]

Liberals don't translate to talk radio as well as neo-cons or cons or whatever you call the conservatives these days. Liberals, in radio and other media, do better when they produce the television programs, greenlight the movies and write 99.9% of the songs that get put on the radio.

You can only listen to Michael Savage once a day, you can listen to Green Day's CD all day long.

I remember seeing a documentary series called "Songs That Changed the World" that claimed Aretha Franklin's "Respect" was just as influential in the black Civil Rights movement as Martin Luther King - mainly because people only heard about Dr. King during news bulletins, whereas at any time of the day people who turned on the radio had a good chance of hearing "Respect".

Back on topic, down the government-owned Australian Broadcasting Corporation is supposed to be unbiased... which results in whichever side is in power at the time accusing it of bias toward the opposition. I remember a few years ago the host of a program called Good News Week, after moving from our ABC to a commercial network, commented "the best thing is that we don't have to be balanced any more".

[PatrickG]

I think we should eliminate the FCC personally.

All these election restrictions are idiotic.

If they want to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, I suggest we eliminate the two party monopoly on it though.

[palaeomerus]

I'm all for tearing up McCain Feingold. (The law...not it's sponsors.)

[Ian Boothby]

Argh another liberal is pushing to bring back the fairness doctrine so they can silence conservative voices on the radio and on tv. I don't wana hear a damn word from anyone who says they hate censorship yet they approve of this. Well your thoughts?


What is it?

[PatrickG]

The fairness doctrine says that every time somebody voices a pro-Republican stance, Democrats get equal time to rebut and vice versa.

My whole thing is this: People choose what they watch. I know informed liberals and conservatives who choose to watch an hour of Fox News, half an hour of CNN, followed by half an hour of NPR.

If somebody wants to watch conservative news all the time, let 'em.

If the fairness doctrine came back, Jon Stewart would have to surrender the mic to Rush Limbaugh for fifteen minutes. A network that airs a pro-gay marriage movie might be forced to devote programming time opposing gay marriage if the story is blatantly political enough I think.

And worst of all, the fairness doctrine assumes that there are two binary viewpoints on issues which can counterbalance eachother.

As though you're either in favor of something or against it. No compromise. No third option.

Guy A gets up and praises Bush for five minutes. Guy B gets up and slams Bush for five minutes. Nobody gets to agree with Bush, agree with democrats and suggest a compromise or a middleground approach.

It's all about equality between conservatives and liberals and if you aren't one of the two, you get marginalized.

[Forsaken_One]

What about the public broadcast stations? Conservatives hardly get equal time there...It's not as though they can show up and say well we want 50% airtime...
I have to disagree with this. I listen to KQED (NPR station in San Francisco of all places) on a fairly regular basis (regular being 9-5 monday-friday for the last two months or so) and it's been my experience that they've consistantly had both progressive and conservative guests on their talk shows, be it Forum or Talk of the Nation. Furthermore they don't speak down to the conservatives they have on, they respect their opinions and give them as much time to make their points as they give any progressive guests. Very rarely have I come upon a National Public Radio program that was heavily slanted one way or the other (and yes, there have been a few slanted heavily towards the conservative side of the fence).

Having said this it's a business...if a liberal commentator were attracting a large audience then there would be a home in radio land for that commentator.
I also have to take issue with this, buisness does what's best for buisness, not just what gets ratings. A great example of this is the Telecommunications Act of 1996, an act which gave our High Definition Television airwaves to the broadcast stations rather than selling them off for billions of dollars that go into the public coffers. And this act wasn't commented on television or radio until after it was signed into law (Yes, by Clinton; this isn't a Republican vs. Democrat issue), and even then it was just one show on the "Fleecing of America" (NBC news peice as I recall) afterwards and even then left alone.

There's a plethora of other examples of corporations intentionally omitting damaging news from their own broadcasts, including one rather amusing Saturday Night Live cartoon about the vast Media mergers that NBC made sure to never show again, even in reruns of that episode of Saturday Night Live. The point being if the corporations who control television and radio don't want a specific issue to be addressed or want one political party or another to win in an area due to corporate interests, they can and most likely will do whatever they can to make that happen, regardless of the ratings they might get by airing it.

[PatrickG]

By the way... I think it would be more fair, speaking as a third party guy, if we just banned any politician from being presented in a positive light. (If we banned negative reporting it'd be fascism. I think banning positive reporting would be more free spirited.)

So Limbaugh can talk smack about Democrats but he can't defend Republicans. If he accepts a call from someone talking smack about Bush, he can't rebutt. Jay Leno can make fun of Clinton but he can't apologise for it if the crowd boos. Chris Matthews can't praise Kennedy or FDR. Hillary Clinton can write a book but if she has anything nice to say about Plato, she can keep it to herself.

Politics is a bloodsport. Why don't we just disable people from cheering their own team if we're going to regulate speech.

[palaeomerus]

Why don't we just leave well enough alone and let Rush Limbaugh and Randi Rhodes both say whatever they want on the air?

[Forsaken_One]

Why don't we just leave well enough alone and let Rush Limbaugh and Randi Rhodes both say whatever they want on the air?
I'm in favor of that. Amusingly enough though I don't think most conservatives, who are generally seen as against big government, would be in favor of television being able to do whatever it wanted. No FCC, no worries about showing nudity on television, no fines for swear words, hell a channel could have 24-7 pornography if they wanted to. After all, it's a free market. If people don't want to hear swearing or see nudity then naturally it won't happen... right?

[palaeomerus]

Well you can't do WHATEVER YOU WANT because what's to stop me from building a huge transmitter and jamming all the local broadcast waves with whatever I consider to be good stuff...like ordering my minions to kill people that I find annoying and threatening everyone?

You need to have someone controlling who has access to which channel and preventing people from perhaps unintentionally building equipment that jams out the signal for the people next door. There is a valid place for the FCC.

Now as for nipples on the Super Bowl I don't much care but if you have some moron telling people how to build pipe bombs and giving addresses and phone numbers of people they want harrassed or harmed out on the air then THAT needs to be curtailed by somebody at some level be it state, local, or federal.

[kingdom2000]

Whats the Fairness Doctrine?

[Briareos]

Its a old fcc rule that was droped in the 80's saying if you put on one viewpoint you had to devote equal time to the other viewpoint. So satanists would need equal time on christian radio and tv stations ect. ;)

[TheLyle]

The fairness doctrine says that every time somebody voices a pro-Republican stance, Democrats get equal time to rebut and vice versa.

IIRC, the actual language is something more like 'both sides of an issue has to be given equal time'. There are a lot of ways to get around that, however, so I don't think the fairness doctrine will be anywhere as radical a change as some people think.

There's a different rule about giving candidates equal time in an election campaign, which I suspect gets confused quite a bit. I'm sure there's wiggle room there, however, just based on how third-party candidates struggle for coverage.

I recall Laura Flanders had a former FCC person as a guest once and they talked about misconceptions about the fairness doctrine. According to that guest (IIRC), equal time would not require broadcasters to put up differently-biased programs but would require news programming to talk to both sides. The guest seemed to want to emphasize to Flander's (mostly) liberal audience that if the Fairness Doctrine were to be re-instated it wouldn't change the radio landscape as they presume it would.

As an example, if Al Franken talks to Paul Krugman about the economy, he would have to give time to someone who has an opposing viewpoint from Krugman. Al would still be free to be nice to Krugman and try to poke holes in what the opposition says, just that he'd have to give each party airtime. (I think there isn't much required about the oppositiion so you could still stack the deck by booking a weak debater to represent the oppositing viewpoint as long as it's not obvious.)

I'm not sure how that would effect cases where, for example, someone like Ann Coulter or Maureen Dowd makes an appearance on a show to promote her book. I suspect that's a different case if their reason for appearing is self-promotion and not to advocate a particular political position.

It was an interesting interview... I'll check if I still have the program in my iTunes library and post a link to the file if I can.

By the way... I think it would be more fair, speaking as a third party guy, if we just banned any politician from being presented in a positive light. (If we banned negative reporting it'd be fascism. I think banning positive reporting would be more free spirited.)

So Limbaugh can talk smack about Democrats but he can't defend Republicans. If he accepts a call from someone talking smack about Bush, he can't rebutt. Jay Leno can make fun of Clinton but he can't apologise for it if the crowd boos. Chris Matthews can't praise Kennedy or FDR. Hillary Clinton can write a book but if she has anything nice to say about Plato, she can keep it to herself.

Politics is a bloodsport. Why don't we just disable people from cheering their own team if we're going to regulate speech.

Actuallly, that would be a bad thing for a third party guy... generally negative campaigning reduces voter turnout as voters just get turned off with an idea that "they're all crooks anyway, so why bother" and only the more hard-core partisans end up heading to the polls. Low voter turnouts tend to favor the incumbents in our current voting system.