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Commentary - Harold Furchtgott-Roth: The dangers of the Fairness Doctrine
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WASHINGTON (Map, News) - This summer, three Democratic senators have called for a return of the Fairness Doctrine, a misguided concept that required broadcasters to provide a forum for different viewpoints when discussing controversial public issues.
In 1987, the Federal Communications Commission under Dennis Patrick found the Fairness Doctrine to be unconstitutional and repealed it. Now, Sens. Durbin, Feinstein, and Kerry are among those who want to reintroduce it.
Broadcast investments in Disney, CBS, Clear Channel, and thousands of smaller companies would suffer if the Fairness Doctrine were revived. If a local sportscaster calls Alex Rodriguez the best baseball talent in New York, fans of Jeter, Reyes, Wright and Maine might want equal time. Anyone not happy with Katie Couric’s statements about the beauty of a town could demand time to respond. Successful programming rife with opinion, such as Rush Limbaugh’s show, could not easily be broadcast. Even ordinary, day-to-day broadcast operations would be affected.
Broadcast owners would not necessarily accommodate every request for response time, but disgruntled viewers could and would make their dissatisfaction known to the FCC at the time of license renewal. Companies owning stations up for license renewal could be forced to confront a large number of complaints simply due to the content of their programming.
Putting the government in a position of deciding the content that must be broadcast and, implicitly, which content must not, is an untenable situation in a free society. Other countries have state-owned or controlled broadcast stations — not America. Mr. Patrick and his FCC colleagues did not abolish the Fairness Doctrine to help Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk radio hosts who were not yet on the air. No one could have predicted in 1987 how much America wanted conservative talk radio. Mr. Patrick and his colleagues simply saw the obvious: an unconstitutional policy that was hamstringing the day-to-day operations of commercial broadcasters.
Regardless, Mr. Durbin and some of colleagues want to resurrect the Fairness Doctrine. Their motivation is transparent — they want to roll back radio to the good old days when there was no conservative talk medium. Congress can change laws, but it can change neither the Constitution nor technology.
Comments from Examiner Readers
10:53 AM MST on Fri., Jul. 20, 2007 re: "Pietro S. Nivola: Uncle Sam suffering from attention deficit disorder"
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4:57 AM MST on Wed., May. 9, 2007
re: "Sunlight study sees 10 ways to open the House"
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Mr. Mirth Alert said:
Mr. Nivola should thank the Lord that he's allowed to put his ignorance on public display, for he knows little about division of labor & nothing about attention deficit disorder. Division of labor was a mfr.'ing scheme, to produce more for less, i.e., increase profit. Despite Mr. Mellon's early 20th-century claim that good govt. is good business, govt. neither mfrs. nor turns a profit. & This notion of doing a little of everything need not be explained by some questionable medical diagnosis but rather by the very dictum that got the guy who appointed all the policy makers elected: "I can please all of the people all of the time." Overstretched govt. is the product of deliberate planning, not some behavioral miscue.
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Examiner Reader said:
Sorry, but this Open House Project commentary reads like an Onion parody column: who @the Sunlight Fdn. sincerely believes that Congress has any interest in empowering the public? The gulf betw. haves & have-nots widens a little more each day, & as "haves" Congress sure as shootin' has nothing to gain by reducing that gulf. Never mind all this techno nonsense, Sunlight Fdn.: arrest members of Congress & detain them for 48 hr; if for no reason other than to shake it outta its "have" stupor.
297 agree | 308 disagree
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