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A funny thing happened on the NPR show, "News and Notes" the other day. Host Farai Chideya asked a trio of bloggers with divergent political views to opine about talk of reviving the Fairness Doctrine -- an old Federal Communications Commission policy that used to require broadcast licensees to allow equal time to advocates for all sides of a controversial public issues. The FCC stopped enforcing the policy in 1987.
In response, La Shawn Barber was quick to cite the arguments that she and other conservatives have made: that liberals are out to silence conservative talk radio hosts by law, since they can't compete against them in the marketplace.
The funny thing was that the guy most likely to argue with LaShawn -- progressive blogger Earl Dunovant (Prometheus 6) didn't argue for reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine at all. In fact, he and the other blogger-guest, Casey Lartigue, talked about why the Fairness Doctrine was unnecessary and impractical.
Why are Barber and other conservative activists so worried about a policy whose return has not been proposed?
Why the fairness doctrine was enacted, and why it went away
The fundamental reason for the Fairness Doctrine was physics, not a particular political agenda. In 1949, when the policy was adopted, radio and television programs were transmitted over airwaves that took up a finite portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The FCC was created, in part, to dole out licenses to broadcasters to use specific frequencies on the spectrum. To preserve the First Amendment principle of an open marketplace of ideas, the government declared that broadcast licensees had to operate in the public interest, including making demonstrable efforts to ensure fair debate.
Advocates for the Fairness Doctrine's demise in the 1980s argued, in part, that the advent of cable and satellite broadcasting made the technical reasons for the doctrine obsolete. Today, the Doctrine's opponents add the existence of the Internet to the list of reasons why the Doctrine is unnecessary to ensure the representation of diverse views. Critics also also argued that government officials have used the Doctrine to stifle political opponents on both the left and right.
Why some people wanted to see the Fairness Doctrine brought back
There's been talk about reviving the Fairness Doctrine at various times over the last 20 years, most recently in 2004, after the controversy surrounding Sinclair Broadcasting Group's decision -- later rescinded -- requiring its 62 television stations to run an anti-John Kerry documentary in the final weeks of that year's presidential campaign. To Steve Rendall of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the Sinclair episode was part of a larger drama:
Sinclair’s history of one-sided editorializing and right-wing water-carrying,... puts it in the company of political talk radio, where right-wing opinion is the rule, locally and nationally. Together, they are part of a growing trend that sees movement conservatives and Republican partisans using the publicly owned airwaves as a political megaphone—one that goes largely unanswered by any regular opposing perspective. It’s an imbalance that begs for a remedy.
In 2005, Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) introduced the Media Ownership and Reform Act, which attempted to restore both the Fairness Doctrine and limits on media ownership that had aslo been relaxed in recent years. MORA never made it out of committee.
This past January, presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) promised attendees at a media reform conference that he would fight to bring the Fairness Doctrine back. Kucinich has made media reform a plank in his presidential platform. He has neither sponsored nor co-sponsored legislation on the issue.
Finally, in June, a report (.pdf) by the Center for American Progress and Freepress.net argued that the dominance of conservative voices in political talk radion did not reflect consumer demand. Instead, they argued, consumers' choices were being limited because of the failure to control the growing concentration of media ownership, and the lack of local community involvement in programming.
Coincidentally, in late-June, Sens. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) and John Kerry (D-MA) gave separate interviews suggesting that a return of the Doctrine might be a good idea.
The threat conservative critics see
Conservative advocates such as La Shawn Barber believe that the demise of the Fairness Doctrine helped fuel the rise of right-wing talk, and that bringing it back would chill conservative speech:
In practice, the Fairness Doctrine is impractical. A conservative broadcaster seeking to establish his solo show probably wouldn’t include a liberal in the format to argue for the
