To To Quote Randy Quaid in the movie 'Independence Day'...

...I'm Back! (For those who need further explanation it is one of the key suspenseful moments in all of movies where Randy's alien abductors are about to level all of the cities on Earth and he flies his jet fighter into the heart of the alien central command spacecraft.) Does that make it clear?

For the past few months I have been on hiatus playing with the grandkids, watching political races and elections, working for candidates that I think might have the right idea, and defending Brett Favre, and now I am refreshed and ready to start writing again. I am going to start slow, though, with just a brief comment about my favorite radio station, the completely non-partisan National Public Radio. I will spend the next few weeks writing variations on this theme.

This morning Steve Inskeep was interviewing writer Anand Giridharadas, who has written a book about India entitled: 'India Calling: The New Land of Opportunity.' I am sure this is a fine book but that is not what this blog is about. About 5 minutes into the interview, actually 5 minutes and 24 seconds, Mr. Giridharas made the comment that the image of India today is incredible but that image might be problematic. With pride in his voice Mr. Inskeep then referred to the United States and those who thought it was in decline, "...we shouldn't miss the fact that it is still the greatest economy the world has ever seen."

Let's think about Mr. Inskeep's comment. The first thing that popped into my mind when I heard it was here was a guy who in the past has been ultra liberal in his commentaries, and he works for an ultra liberal organization, and he says something like that off the top of his head. One might expect him to say that there is no hope, the United States is falling behind the rest of the world, we need to drastically change the way we have been doing business because it isn't working - all that stuff we hear over and over from Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Obama and the rest of the super-left. So what happened? Did the parallel universe suddenly diagonally park? Will Rush Limbaugh start talking about distribution of wealth to create jobs?

I have a hypothesis. Deep down inside in a liberal's heart of hearts lies a proud patriot. There, I said it. No lightening strikes so in the next few days I am going to think out loud about this phenomena. I will call it the red, white and blue syndrome, and it is the wall that will keep big government out of our lives, and has for the past couple of centuries.

This is Too Funny

This is a response from National Public Radio to my letter written to them regarding Cokie Roberts comparing Ronald Reagan to Obama (2 blogs previously at this site) . To refresh memories it was a few paragraphs to NPR at one point commenting that comparing Obama to Jimmy Carter would have been more realistic. This is what NPR replied:

Dear Susan,

Thank you for contacting NPR.

We appreciate your making us aware of this problem. After conducting a minor repair, we were able to correct the issue. Please let us know if your problems persist, as it should now function properly.

We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.

Thank you for listening, and for your continued support of public broadcasting. For the latest news and information, visit NPR.org.

Sincerely,

Erin

NPR Services

My question is: What did they do to Cokie Roberts?

Comparison of Reagan and Obama?

A Letter to National Public Radio:

This has to be the strangest comparison I have heard of. Perhaps if Cokie Roberts had compared their abilities to speak to an audience and fire them up I would agree, but to try, in any way, to discuss their similarities when it comes to economic policies or their attitude towards the country is wrong.

First, Reagan gave speeches on how great the country was and kept pushing the idea that small government was the key to business in this country continuing to expand. Smaller government, to Reagan, meant more freedom for the people of the United States - and he said so over and over again.

Obama has been the polar opposite, continually talking down what has made America great and promoting a much larger, expansive government. In the process the unemployment numbers have remained high because businesses do not know what new tax or regulation the Obama administration - and Congress - are going to hit them with.

The idea that President Obama believes that government taking more of our tax dollars and the only way to make businesses hire more people is to give them those tax dollars is not Reagonomics or Clintonomics or Kennedynomics.

How about a comparison of Obama and Jimmy Carter? That is closer to reality.

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

Did the Fairness Doctrine Ever Work?

Why do some support government intervention?

1. Does the “scarce” amount of spectrum space require oversight by federal regulators? Based on historical evidence although the spectrum is limited, the number of broadcasters in America has continuously increased.

2. Is “Fairness” or “Fair Access” best determined by federal regulators? Or is it correct that the FCC bureaucrats cannot determine what is “fair” or enforce it? In a recent discussion FCC Commissioner Michael Copps took broadcasters to task for their current programming content, speaking of “too little news, too much baloney passed off as news. Too little quality entertainment, too many people eating bugs on reality TV, too little local and regional music, and too much brain-numbing national play lists.” Mr. Copps believes he is in a position to determine what people in this country should listen to on the radio or view on television. He would obviously be promoting his own opinion, and would consider his actions “fair.”

3. Will the Fairness Doctrine guarantee that more opinions will be aired? In the past seventy years arbitrary enforcement of the Doctrine has been shown to diminish, not encourage, vigorous debate.

There are numerous writings pointing to individual instances where the Fairness Doctrine inhibited the freedom of speech. One of those cases was remembered by Nat Hentoff, a journalist with the Village Voice in New York. He has been writing his column, “Liberty Beat,” since 1957, and in 2001 he received a lifetime achievement award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. He is considered by his peers to be one of the finest journalists of his generation. He considered the Fairness Doctrine as exemplifying what George Orwell called “Newspeak”:# it uses language to mask the harmful effects of its supposed meaning.

His personal experience with the Doctrine occurred in the 1940’s when he was working at WMEX radio station in Boston. He explained how they covered politics and politicians, and offered their political opinions on the air. Then the Fairness Doctrine letters started coming in from the FCC and the station’s front office panicked. Lawyers were called, tapes of shows were reviewed, and responses had to be sent to the FCC. After a few of these letters the radio station’s boss announced that there would be no more controversial stories of any sort on WMEX. They had been “muzzled.”

In 1969 the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Fairness Doctrine in the Red Lion decision. During arguments before the Court, broadcasters stated that the Doctrine had a chilling effect on their business practices, leading many of them to abandon their coverage of controversial issues in favor of “safe” issues.

In 1985 the FCC issued a report concluding the Doctrine no longer served the public interest and instead chilled First Amendment speech. Note this is the FCC making this statement. The Commission predicted that without the chilling effect of the Fairness Doctrine it was reasonable to expect an increase in the coverage of controversial issues of public importance.

In 1987 the FCC formally renounced the Fairness Doctrine, and the FCC has stated that since then there has been more, rather than less, coverage of controversial issues. The amount of opinion-oriented programming exploded over the following six years and the number of radio talk shows jumped from 400 to more than 900. Many observers attribute this growth directly to the absence of the inhibiting effect of the Fairness Doctrine. Even Louise Slaughter agreed that AM radio popularity rose at that time. “It wasn’t even gradual…almost immediately.”

Even after the decades of proof of the inhibiting of ideas due to the Fairness Doctrine there are still those that want it back. In their 2005 book, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy, Hacker and Pierson wrote: “…the proliferation of new media…has fostered a strongly right-wing journalistic presence in talk radio and on cable. The FCC…surely can justify restoring the simple requirement that the news include a fair representation of views…”

Where do Americans get their “every day” news?

“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 (talk radio) to people who hear nothing but that, who never believe or hear any countervailing opinion ..” Louise Slaughter, Interview with Bill Moyers

The Pew Research Center conducted surveys on campaign news and political communication among 1,506 adults December 19^th through January 4^th, 2004.

Americans are more frequently getting their election news from cable news networks, morning TV shows, talk radio, NPR, the Internet and Comedy TV shows (Conservative Colbert Report and Liberal Daily Show, for example.). There has been a decline in accessing other sources of news, especially nightly network news, daily newspapers and news magazines. The Chart also shows that there are so many sources of information to Americans, that it leads one to believe that, as said by Adrian Cronauer, the Fairness Doctrine is a solution in search of a problem. Is having so many media outlets effecting our individual freedom, order or equality between individuals and groups in our society?

Some, such as Ms. Slaughter, might argue that there is unfair media bias slanting towards Conservative thought, but fairness is in the eye of the beholder. According to the polling, overall, about as many Americans now say news organizations are biased in favor of one of the two parties as say there is no bias in election coverage (39% vs. 38%). A much larger number of Democrats believe that coverage of the campaign (Presidential campaign of the year 2000) tilted in favor of Republicans. More than four in ten Republicans (42%) see news coverage of the campaign as biased in favor of the Democrats. There has also been a significant number of Independents that believe the election news is not free of bias.

Conclusions can be drawn from the polling results that, across the board, whether Conservative, Liberal, Independent, or specific age groups, or educational backgrounds, more than 50% of respondents to the survey believed that there was bias in the media. And each of the groups believed that the bias was toward opposing opinions from their own. More importantly would be the indication that Americans are going to all sources in the media for their news, and they are aware that it is necessary to sift through all of the information to find out what is really going on, or perhaps sift through to substantiate their preconceived ideas about a topic.

Radio has been accused of being the most biased, and influencing the most voters, according to Louise Slaughter and other supporters of the Fairness Doctrine. But as can be seen in the chart at the right, compared to the other sources of information, a very small percentage of voters get their campaign news from the radio. Democrats and Independents tend to look to newspapers and the mainstream nightly news stations for their campaign news.

Those rallying for the return of the Fairness Doctrine believe that what some consider politically incorrect speech must be “balanced” by law – which is to say, by the government. Others have a different opinion. In a discussion of the Fairness Doctrine, then Vice President of the United States Al Gore said, “The administration sees market forces replacing regulations and judicial models that are no longer appropriate. The administration’s goal is to provide the principles…one of those principles should be to trust in an overall market concept in the coverage of public issues with the obvious First Amendment advantages it provides.” In other words, a media outlet, in its efforts to bring in a larger audience, has the right to report the news the way their customers want to see it or hear it.

Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press

“Without deviation, without exception, without any ifs, buts, or whereas, freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they express, or the words they speak or write.” Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black#

The concept of Freedom of Speech is an inherent human right, the right to voice an opinion publicly without fear of censorship or punishment. It is recognized formally around the world by the laws of most nations, and depending on the type of government that is in place, the laws are upheld or ignored. Even the United Nations has a Declaration of Human Rights, which includes a person’s “right to hold opinions without interference and a right to freedom of expression.”

The topic of free speech is one of the most contentious issues in a society, but is an important part of, as Rawls suggests, balancing liberty and equality. Because the freedom is so highly valued, limitations placed on it are always going to be controversial. The U.S. Supreme Court has written that this freedom is the matrix and the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom. But freedom of speech is always going to be limited because it will always take place in a framework of competing values. In the case of the Fairness Doctrine one could say the competing values were the political ideologies of conservatives and liberals.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees that “Congress shall make no law…. abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Over time, the press has come to mean all of the media, and the courts have decided many cases that define how far freedom of the press extends under the law. One aspect of a free press is its ability to champion causes that it favors without having to argue the case for the other side.

In coming up with the Fairness Doctrine the FCC believed it would provide a vibrant marketplace of ideas among broadcasters of television and radio stations. The broadcast media have traditionally been treated differently because they were licensed by the FCC to operate as semi monopolies. Print media were not included within the enforcement power of the FCC. This was because there was no limitation on how much could be printed, unlike the limitations for transmission over the airwaves.

As we know, the media in the United States are in business to make money, which they mainly do by selling advertising. To sell advertising, they provide entertainment on a mass basis, which is their general function. Both print and electronic media determine which events are newsworthy largely on the basis of audience appeal. This has always been the case in this country.

The rise of mass circulation newspapers in the 1830’s produced a politically independent press in the U.S. In their aggressive competition for readers, those newspapers often engaged in sensational reporting, a charge sometimes leveled at today’s media. Even when there was nothing sensational to report the media sometimes took it upon themselves to create news that would sell papers. A prime example of this would be newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) with his chain of newspapers, along with his friend, publisher Joseph Pulitzer. Hearst’s New York City paper, the New York Morning Journal, became known for sensationalist writing and for its agitation in favor of the Spanish-American War in 1898. Even the term yellow journalism (a reference to scandal-mongering, sensationalism, and similar practices) was derived from the Journal's color comic strip, The Yellow Kid. Were Hearst and Pulitzer over-stepping a journalistic moral code?

According to Janda, Berry and Goldman in The Challenge of Democracy, the five specific functions of the media are to report the news, interpret the news, influence citizens’ opinions, set the agenda for government action, and socialize citizens about politics. If these “rules” of reporting the news are correct then a Fairness Doctrine would not fit within any of the five listed functions. A news radio station such as NPR would have every right to report and interpret the news as they see it, thereby influencing public opinion and setting the agenda for government with a viewpoint matching the newspersons running the station. We see that occurring now with newspapers and radio and TV stations that come up with news stories that reflect the political leanings of the particular media outlet. Janda says that the media has the freedom and the obligation to go after particular “newsworthy” stories that might lead to the resignation of a President, the downfall of a corporation, or simply support for a particular candidate running for office.

Within the United States political communication moves in two directions: from government to citizens and from citizens to government. This communication rarely travels directly from government to citizens without passing through the media, especially at this time in our history. In addition, political communication not only travels between our government and its citizens and back again, but between governments and citizens around the world.

In all articles and comments that I have read about why we need a Fairness Doctrine, one idea keeps popping up: that news sources in this country are limited, and the only voice being heard is the conservative voice. But where do Americans really get their news from, and does everyone believe that some news is biased to certain perspectives, whereas other news is not?