Just a Few More Thoughts on the Fairness Doctrine...

Who decides what is fair?

Who gets to decide what “fair” is? Representatives and Senators? FCC Commissioners? A free market based on supply and demand? Is it philosophers and scholars of political science? Should economists decide? Is it those with an active role in politics, whether in the media or more directly as activists, campaigners, or officials? Is it the public? Should Christian Scientists? The Amish certainly have opinions about medical procedures. Atheists have a great deal to say about God and religious practices.

If President Obama appears on television, the Republicans in some cases have time to respond, but nobody else does (other than the talking heads, of course). Libertarians don't get the opportunity to present their case with free air time. Nor do Objectivists, Socialists, Communists, or any of the other myriad schools of political thought. Is that fair? Democrats and Republicans likely think so.

Our society is so diverse in its ideas that there is no way to find a common ground for everyone concerned through government intervention. Even our information comes from a large variety of sources, some not even under the “rules” of the FCC. The fact is that any blogger trying to boost traffic knows that the public decides what they want to listen to, with little regard for fairness or equal opportunity. Conservatives read conservative web sites and listen to conservative radio. Liberals read liberal web sites and newspapers. There are even people who cross over to media with differing ideologies just to see what’s going on, or to get a contradictory view on a subject. Research polling suggests that people are tuning in to CNN and FOX news at an almost equal percentage. Neither is considered by many to be centrist in their overall news programming.

The FCC itself changes its point of view based on who is living in the White House. There are five Commissioners that are deciding what is fair, and 3 are appointed by the sitting President of the United States. Looking back, the Commissioners appointed by Jimmy Carter did not have the same opinions regarding what was fair in broadcasting as did the Commissioners appointed by Ronald Reagan. And the fact that the Commissioners appointed by Bill Clinton were more closely aligned with the Reagan appointees just illustrates how muddled the entire fairness issue really is. As Al Gore had said, the trust in an overall market concept is important in the coverage of public issues.

Supply, Demand and Public Issues

As stated in the first part of the book The Economics of Public Issues, Miller, Benjamin and North explain that we live in a world of scarcity, of limited resources, and that we have unlimited wants. The Federal Communications Commission began because of scarcity in the amount of bandwidth available for transmission of radio signals, and that scarcity caused the numerous active radio stations to bleed over onto other bandwidths, and other station’s transmissions, in their efforts to raise their signals and reach a wider audience – wider audience meant more advertising, and more profits for the station. The FCC needed to be created to control transmission of radio signals. But the FCC was not satisfied with doing just that. For political reasons, or simply wanting to have more power over the expanding media world, or both, they chose to come up with a way not only to manage the “physical” airwaves but to control the actual content of the programming that the radio stations were transmitting. They did this by creating the Fairness Doctrine.

Should stations have been allowed to continue to develop their distinctive programming personalities to appeal to specific listening constituencies, as they are now doing? It has been shown that stations in large enough markets, when left alone, develop programming that consistently appeals to particular political, ethnic, or economic partisans. A station stays in business if there are enough listeners to justify a particular programming format.

Choices should be left to the stations to decide not only the kinds of music or entertainment programs that they broadcast, but also on whether or not they offer programming that delves into public controversies, or features candidates for public office. Stations should also be free to take a particular political posture without fear of coercion, constraint, intimidation or reprisal, all things that the FCC did while trying to enforce the Fairness Doctrine.

History has shown that some stations will not program discussions of public issues at all. Does it justify the Doctrine’s attitude of forcing public issue programming on listeners who have little or no interest in it? I don’t believe so. When unwanted programming is put in place, history has shown that listeners have simply tuned out or turned the station off completely. Former FCC Commissioner Mark S. Fowler and colleague Daniel L. Brenner stated, “The public’s interest, then, defines the public interest.” And that interest is defined in a very straightforward way: Media outlets supply the programming and the consumers of their “product” can demand more or less based on their interest in what is produced.

Case after case has appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court involving fairness in the media. In 1984 the Supreme Court declared that there were an a large number of radio and television channels around the country, and the reasons for having a Fairness Doctrine were not necessary. The FCC followed in 1987 with their own admission that the intrusion by government into the content of programming occasioned by the enforcement of the Doctrine unnecessarily restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters and actually inhibits the presentation of controversial issues of public importance to the detriment of the public and in degradation of the editorial prerogative of broadcast journalists.

Repeal of the Bill of Rights? “We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” President John F. Kennedy