“Holy crap!” said Free Speech
Merry Christmas! In the spirit of the “please don’t talk about candidates and issues at the same time” portion of the McCain-Feingold censorship act, Democrats are attempting to bring back the “fairness doctrine” to radio and television. You may recall that political opinion on the airwaves blossomed in the late eighties. That’s because the “fairness doctrine” was abandoned, and radio stations could air political speech without fear of reprisal. Dennis Kucinich, in charge of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the House Government Reform Committee, wants to bring it back.
The fairness doctrine wasn’t fair. It was a means of making it difficult and unappealing for stations to air political speech except when it came from politicians (when it counted as news). From Ed Morrissey:
The Fairness Doctrine did not require broadcasters to present issues in a “fair and honest manner”; it required them to turn their stations into ping-ponging punditry if they allowed opinion to appear on the air at all. It created such a complicated formula that most broadcasters simply refused to air any political programming, as it created a liability for station owners for being held hostage to all manner of complaints about lack of balance.
This from the folks that the ACLU poesized “would soon bring the Bill of Rights back into style”. That’s what you get when you support a party rather than a principle.
Nat Hentoff remembers working for a Boston station during the era of the Fairness Doctrine:
Soon after listener complaints of unfairness to the FCC resulted in mounting legal costs to answer stern FCC inquiries, the boss ordered us to cease all controversial broadcasting.
The fairness doctrine is a means by which the government can punish broadcasters who air undesirable opinions, either directly (as Nixon did) or indirectly by simply making it too expensive to air anything controversial.
In response to ACLU supports the right to bear arms?: Does the ACLU now support the right to own and carry weapons, or does it think that this power has been stripped from the military and police?
- ACLU supports the right to bear arms?
- Does the ACLU now support the right to own and carry weapons, or does it think that this power has been stripped from the military and police?
- Kucinich To Bring Back The Fairness Doctrine
- “Democrats aren’t wasting much time in rolling back free speech now that they have the majority. Putting Kucinich in charge of domestic policy reform was no mistake on their part. They want to kill talk radio, and if they manage to hold their majority and win the White House in 2008, they just might do it.“
- Bill Bradley’s speech tax
- “Suppose,” Salant told me, “the English governor had told Tom Paine that he could go ahead and publish all he liked—but only if at the back of the pamphlets, he also printed the Royal Governor’s views. That command, far from being an implementation of free speech, would have been just the opposite.”
- Chilling The Internet? Lessons from FCC Regulation of Radio Broadcasting
- “CBS, the Washington Post, and other Nixon ‘media enemies’ felt pressure because the executive branch was able to manipulate the federal broadcast licensing system, ‘punishing’ those whose coverage was deemed unfavorable through Fairness Doctrine challenges and competitive applications at the time of license renewal.”
- The Fairness Doctrine: A Solution in Search of a Problem
- “Fairness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The necessarily subjective judgments imposed on the industry throughout the years led to a Kafkaesque situation in which broadcasters were never sure what was expected of them nor what they could be punished for. Underlying much of the concern over the Fairness Doctrine is an uneasy feeling among civil libertarians and some First Amendment advocates that the doctrine is yet another weapon for the federal government, a government which has never been comfortable with a broadcasting industry that it cannot control.”
- Joe McCarthy: Father of the Fairness Doctrine?
- “McCarthy interpreted this to mean that anytime anyone on television took a stand on a controversial issue, an equal and opposing opinion had to be presented. He sold the public on this view and cajoled the individual stations and networks into accepting it, giving him free access to television on the flimsiest of reasons.”
Remember: Trump reassures crowd after assassination attempt fails. (read more…)
Blogroll
- According To Hoyt
- Ace of Spades HQ
- The Anchoress
- John Hayward
- Legal Insurrection
- National Motorists blog
- The Other McCain
- samizdata.net
- Sultan Knish