They Said What?

Are They Serious?

According to Nancy Pelosi the people in this country should, and I quote, “quit your jobs to follow your dreams…and don’t worry, the government will take care of you.”

This quote competes with President Calderon of Mexico who said, “the new Arizona law will lead to racial profiling and the arrest and deportation of immigrants that have come to the U.S. from Mexico…” And in his next breath when asked by Wolf Blitzer what does Mexico do with illegal immigrants that come into their country from Central and South America he actually said, “we arrest them and either put them in jail or send them back across the border, of course.”

Who can forget Woody Allen's comment, seriously, about how President Obama should be left alone by everyone to do what he wants. Does everyone include the Congress and the Supreme Court? Perhaps Mr. Allen forgets that our government is not set up as a dictatorship?

As the government takes over more and more of private industry radio talk show host Michawl Medved asked just how efficient is government to run a business. He said, “Where do you feel you get the best service - at a Starbucks or at your local Motor Vehicle Department?”

And speaking of radio talk shows here is part two of our series on the Fairness Doctrine:

Fairness, Justice, and the Public Interest

“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficial…The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

What is in the public interest? This seems to be at the heart of the debate over the Fairness Doctrine. The public interest refers to the common well-being or general welfare, and is central to policy debates, politics, democracy and the nature of government itself. While nearly everyone claims that aiding the common well-being or general welfare is positive, there is little, if any, consensus on what exactly constitutes the public interest. The public interest is often contrasted with the private or individual interest, under the assumption that what is good for society may not be good for a given individual and vice versa. The Fairness Doctrine explains that the interests, or rights, of all of the people in our society should be paramount. Is it reasonable to assume you can please everyione all of the time? And what are the costs and what are the benefits to individual liberties when trying to enforce a Fairness Doctrine?

In his A Theory of Justice, John Rawls used a social contract argument to show that justice, and especially distributive justice, is a form of fairness: an impartial distribution of goods. Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. In other words justice is a form of fairness which provides basic liberties to individuals.

Rawls’ principle requires stringent protections for certain specific liberties, and liberty itself is to be assured a fair value. He states, “Fairness is justice, and justice must not be stifled or rejected.”#

Can we look at justice in terms of the Fairness Doctrine? Perhaps we should call it the Equal Time Doctrine until it is proven that it is a form of fairness. In the name of fairness Louise Slaughter and others would have a scarce resource, radio bandwidth, regulated more extensively by the federal government than it currently is. The goal of these additional regulations being an equal or fair distribution of the political ideas being discussed over the airwaves. But is the movement of information in this day and age being distributed unfairly? Some might argue that the opposite is true, and information is flowing faster than any one person can keep up with. The idea behind the Fairness Doctrine is to encourage diverse programming, and airing of controversial views. At any given time an individual can tune in radio stations that provide programming of a religious nature, political editorializing, news from around the world including current events, or just music. All of these can be in English as well as foreign languages. And that is just the radio stations. There is also television, newspapers (national to the local level), the Internet, and satellite broadcasting.

Will tighter restrictions encourage a freer flow of ideas, and at what cost to individual liberty? There is disagreement from economists and political scientists over whether government intervention is actually in the public interest.

Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek said, in an interview with Thomas Hazlett of the American Enterprise Institute, in June of 1992, “…the idea that things ought to be designed in a “just” manner means, in effect, that we must abandon the market and turn to a planned economy in which somebody decides how much each ought to have, and that means, of course, that we can only have it at the price of the complete abolition of personal liberty.”#

Philosopher Thomas Nagel stated that, “the range of posibilities or likely courses of life that are open to a given individual are limited to a considerable extent by his birth…his genetic endowment.”# He continues, “There is nothing wrong with the State tinkering with that distribution when attempting to equalize benefits to individuals.”#

Thomas Sowell explains, in The Quest for Cosmic Justice, that the “tinkering” mentioned by Nagel in the name of social justice is actually going beyond a social justice and attempting to produce a justice for the Cosmos, which cannot be achieved. Sowell and Hayek would probably agree with critics of the Fairness Doctrine that the current evolution of individual media outlets catering to specific constituencies has already allowed the ‘invisible hand’ phenomenon to work in the marketplace of ideas, just as it does in the commercial marketplace. The following numbers illustrate just how many media organizations are currently working in North America alone:

In North America (numbers are approximations):

Daily Newspapers…..1800

Magazines….11,000

Radio Stations….11,000

Television Stations….2000

Book Publishers….2000

Looking at the past history of successes and failures of the Fairness Doctrine will help us to determine which of the competing ideas holds merit. But first it might be good to look at what is being ‘tinkered’ with.

What is the Fairness Doctrine?

Even though President Obama declared in his campaign speeches and after his election that he would never condone a re-instatement of a 'Fairness Doctrine' he, along with his minions, are starting to talk about it seriously. The President and other Democrats feel that if they can stifle the speech of talk radio and other conservative thinkers the Tea Partiers will go away and everyone in the country will go along with Obama's ideas on how to remake the United States into a nation of socialist ideals. I thought it would be a good idea to start a series about just how 'Fair' the Fairness Doctrine was and why we should all be very concerned as the President and Congress attempt to trample on one of our most precious rights - Freedom of Speech.

Part One - What is the Fairness Doctrine?

For the nearly 20 years she has been in Congress, Louise Slaughter (D-NY) has fought for “fairness” on the airwaves. Her latest legislation on the topic is HR 4710, “The Media Act,” which would reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. Here is a brief excerpt from an interview that she gave to the program NOW with Bill Moyers:

BILL MOYERS: So when the fairness doctrine went down in 1986, that was the first year you came to Congress, what was the consequence of it? What happened as a result?

LOUISE SLAUGHTER: AM radio rose. It wasn't even gradual, Bill. I mean, almost immediately. And I should point out to you that when we tried to reinstate [the fairness doctrine] again in '93, one of the reasons we couldn't was that Rush Limbaugh had organized this massive uprising against it, calling it "The Hush Rush Law." Which again said that while Rush can speak and anybody that he wants to can speak on those stations, the rest of us can't. But he aroused his listeners so that they contacted their members of Congress and killed the bill, and that's not the first time we've seen that.

BILL MOYERS: And you're saying that kind of discourse is dominating America right now.

LOUISE SLAUGHTER: Dominating America and a waste of good broadcast time and a waste of our airwaves.

BILL MOYERS: Not to the people who agree with him.

LOUISE SLAUGHTER: Well, they don't hear anything else. Why would they disagree with him?

BILL MOYERS: But today, you don't have to just listen to one radio. You've got a choice of radio stations. You've got the internet. You've got the magazines. You've got how many? Five hundred channels, they say?

LOUISE SLAUGHTER: Yes. But we don't have all those people lining up to discuss what's going on, what's happening in our country. Frankly, I want every American, every single one, to understand what's happened here.

BILL MOYERS: You're saying that your fairness doctrine would simply mean that if a radio station or television station offers one position, like Rush Limbaugh, on a bill or a campaign of President or an election, they should also have people who disagree with Rush Limbaugh?

LOUISE SLAUGHTER: Absolutely. They should not be putting their own bias and their own feelings out on their radio station because they think they own it. It has to be done as a public trust and in the public interest.

BILL MOYERS: Who decides what fairness is? What is fair? What's the truth?

LOUISE SLAUGHTER: Well, in political circles, it's the equal time piece where if one candidate gets to say something on the air, equal time, no matter what it is, is given to the opponent, again if asked. But fairness can't be that difficult. Surely, we have evolved to the stage here in this century that we can understand some sort of balance, some sort of sense. To me it is a feeling that my country is spilling out hatred and lies on many, many of these stations to people who hear nothing but that, who never believe or hear any countervailing opinion. I think this is one of the most dangerous things in the world, and it actually cuts out a point of view of half of America. And anything that we own as Americans, as a government, like the radio and television waves, should not be used in that way.

An Overview:

In 1934 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was created as a government agency in charge of regulating the airwaves, and administering the “public interest” standard. In other words, interests of the public should have priority over interests of the broadcasters. This was important to its advocates to further democracy, minimize advertising abuses, and encourage diverse programming and airing of controversial views - making broadcasters accountable to the “public”. The policy of the FCC that became known as the Fairness Doctrine was an attempt to ensure that all coverage of controversial issues by a broadcast station be balanced and fair, allowing opposing viewpoints to be aired along with editorial opinions. The personal attack rule, an application of the Fairness Doctrine, required stations to notify persons when personal attacks were made on them in discussions of controversial public issues. In the 1980’s the industry was de-regulated, the Fairness Doctrine was dissolved, giving way to what was called “the marketplace model.”

The Fairness Doctrine has been both defended and opposed on First Amendment grounds. Backers of the doctrine claim that listeners have the right to hear all sides of controversial issues. They believe that broadcasters will resort to partisan coverage if allowed to broadcast without government intervention. Opponents of the Fairness Doctrine say that the doctrine lessens, rather than increases, diversity of views, due to the fact that only safe issues would be broadcast. Also, the additional expense incurred by the broadcasters in allowing for “balanced viewpoints” that are not subsidized by advertising dollars have in the past, and might again, completely rid the airwaves of controversial issues, to the detriment of the public.

Looming in the background is the question of who would determine what was fair. In his research paper, The Fairness Doctrine: A Solution in Search of a Problem, Adrian Cronauer wrote, “Fairness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.” Depending on ones political viewpoints some might consider National Public Radio a moderate broadcaster, while others would find them to be more “left of center” in their choice of material. The opposite might be considered true in the case of FOX news.

The specter of the Fairness Doctrine keeps coming back to haunt those who support First Amendment rights. This series of blogs will attempt to prove that the Fairness Doctrine is set up to defeat its own purposes. First, as soon as a broadcaster arouses public passion by covering a controversial issue he will receive an avalanche of complaints, all wanting equal time to refute what they believed were unfair one-sided ideas being broadcast over the public airwaves. The costs in time, energy and legal fees have in the past caused the broadcasters to stay away from controversial issues, and property rights and a free market economy were being sacrificed because of government intervention in the form of the Fairness Doctrine.

Second, the Doctrine’s supporters seem not to appreciate just how much the broadcast world has changed since the early days of radio and television. With the proliferation of informational resources and technology, the number of broadcast outlets available to the public has increased steadily. In such an environment, it is hard to understand why the federal government must police the airwaves to ensure that differing views are heard.

The result of a reinstituted Fairness Doctrine would not be “fair” at all.