6 ms·

Citizenry will do what they always have: accept the narrative that benefits them the most or that they've been indoctrinated to accept without questioning. The

• testvox 8y ago
  How would you apply the fairness doctrine to the web though. Will I have to host opposing viewpoints on my blog or face fines? The fairness doctrine made sense back when your ability to broadcast your opinions was limited by the shared medium of the radio spectrum. But now that anyone with any viewpoint can broadcast to everyone via the Internet the fairness doctrine doesn't make sense.
  • solarkraft 8y ago
    Why? You're still spreading information and view points ...
    • CrystalLangUser 8y ago
      Why? Why would some random blog be held at the same standard at all as a newspaper?
      • pavlov 8y ago
        Paradoxically there are many people who are conditioned to believe the random blog over the newspaper. People have been told to "think for themselves" and "do their own research", and so when they stumble on a conspiracy-minded blog, it feels like a more authentic voice than mainstream media. I don't know what the solution is. It's impossible and unreasonable to expect individual bloggers to hold the same standard as newspapers traditionally did. Maybe social networks could do something to educate readers?
    • cuckcuckspruce 8y ago
      Okay. I'm looking forward to every blog covering vaccination giving equal time to anti-vaccination viewpoints.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  • r00fus 8y ago
    I think if the fairness doctrine were applied solely to broadcast media (as it is described in aforementioned wikipedia link) then it works. It's not a per-episode or per-program level, it's per-broadcaster. Also the fairness doctrine doesn't include (but worked in conjunction with) the Equal Time rule [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule
  • cm2187 8y ago
    Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard provocatively said once that real impartiality is 50% time for the Jews, 50% time for Hitler. I don’t think I should have to support the views I disagree with anymore than a government should be able to impose their views on my free speech.
• joe_the_user 8y ago
  "Why shouldn't news organizations be held to a similar ethical or moral standard?" [as advertisers or as broadcasters, apparently] Among other problems, the definition of "news organization" is completely fluid in this Internet era. What organization in particular gets a truth or balance mandate? Some? All? Which ever ones the censors consider most credible? "Does it benefit society if the only opinions broadcast as fact are filtered by corporate interests?" Not sure how you got here. Proposing news organizations obey some "truth" or "balance" conditions essentially is mandating state filtering. The Internet, so far, has allowed a wider dissemination of ideas than ever before. Are you saying that organizations, on the net, large and small, broadcasting their views, is "corporate filtered news?" Seems like you're stretching things to say the least.
  • ataturk 8y ago
    I worry because people today aren't reading history. They don't even have any idea what took place in the 1980s during the Soviet era and how the fall of communism shaped today's Europe. I think about the Czechs fighting back, all the intrigue of the two Germanys. Vietnam, Central America... The other thing is, even though the media was always biased and agenda-driven, they weren't completely infiltrated by intelligence agencies and/or mega-corporations.
  • wallace_f 8y ago
    >"corporate filtered news?" Seems like you're stretching things It's worth noting there doesn't need to be a corporate agenda or government conspiracy for humans to exhibit groupthink about ideas. Of course most of human history existed before The Age of Reason made evidence-based reason en vogue; but even today you can read about things like NASA engineers who said exactly how and when the Columbia shuttle would experience a critical foam strike, or scientists who were met with hostility and disparagement when trying to debunk the encyclopedic-, and textbook-published myth about komodo dragons injecting a cocktail of deadly bacteria sith their bites. It seems humans just exhibit this appeal to authority/consensus as an inherent trait. The current climate of promoting democratization, diversity, and freedom except when it comes to democratization, diversity, and freedom of ideas seems to be taking a step backwards for humanity.
• rayiner 8y ago
  > Why shouldn't news organizations be held to a similar ethical or moral standard? At best it gives an imprimatur of credibility to unreliable information. (E.g. as with the food pyramid, doctors' recommendations regarding salt and eggs, etc.)
  • da_chicken 8y ago
    You could say the same of any expert opinion on any topic. That doesn't mean the wisdom of experts is less trustworthy, merely that humans aren't perfect.
• paulddraper 8y ago
  > Citizenry will do what they always have: accept the narrative ...that they've been indoctrinated to accept without questioning. And as the most established institution in society, that's precisely why the government should not indoctrinate narratives, directly or indirectly. The right solution to bad free speech is more speech, not less.
• thankthunk 8y ago
  > that they've been indoctrinated to accept without questioning. Which is made easier when governments define and outlaw "fake" news. What separated us from totalitarian governments in the 20th century was we protected speech while hitler/stalin/mao/etc outlawed "fake news". Do you really want Trump or Obama or Hillary or George Bush to have the power to limit speech? Do you really want either the republican or democratic party to define and outlaw "fake news"? Do you want corporate interests to ban "fake news"? Oil companies bribing politicians to label climate change as fake news? Drug companies bribing politicians to label the drug epidemic as fake news? I certainly don't.
  • phs318u 8y ago
    You mention 'bribing politicians' a few times. There's no need to bribe politicians when you _become_ the politicians.
  • jernfrost 8y ago
    Fake news is what got Hitler into power. The fake news Hitler banned was the “fake” according to the same standard as Trump: news he didn’t like. This issue is not as cut and dry as you think. As Theo van Gogh said: a tolerant society can not be tolertant towards the intolerant.
    • paulddraper 8y ago
      > As Theo van Gogh said: a tolerant society can not be tolertant towards the intolerant. And who, exactly, are these intolerant? Nazis? Communists? Black lives matter? All lives matter? NRA? PETA? Feminists? James Damore? Abolitionists? Abortionists?
    • thankthunk 8y ago
      > Fake news is what got Hitler into power. No. It was called an election. Hitler and the nazis were banned in germany for a while. So banning "fake news" didn't keep hitler from power. > The fake news Hitler banned was the “fake” according to the same standard as Trump: news he didn’t like. That's the point. Do you want trump to be allowed to ban news he doesn't like? I don't. And what turn hitler from an elected official to a dictator was the german governments ability to ban "fake news". If hitler never had the ability to ban "fake news", then he would never have been able to cause the destruction he did because people would have been allowed to challenge, criticize and intellectually attack him. > This issue is not as cut and dry as you think. It is cut and dry. It's the foundational principle of all free society. It's why we never had a hitler, stalin or mao in the US and it's why we never will as long as free speech is guarded. Free speech is the only antidote to totalitarianism. > a tolerant society can not be tolertant towards the intolerant. That's an absurd contradictory logic fallacy. Think about it logically. If you are intolerant of the intolerant then you are the intolerant. Also, the US has 250 years track record debunking that logical fallacy. Besides, that's exactly what hitler said. That's exactly what stalin said. That's mao said. It's what all totalitarians say to justify stifling speech.
• acchow 8y ago
  > Citizenry will do what they always have: accept the narrative that benefits them the most or that they've been indoctrinated to accept without questioning. All human history of progress goes against this claim. We abolished slavery a few centuries ago. Marijuana is being legalized in various countries and states. etc. > The Internet isn't going to magically change human nature. On the contrary, civilization has always challenged "what is acceptable/right/wrong/etc". The internet is allowing us to accelerate this process with easier communication between and congregation of dissidents.
  • maskedSlacker 8y ago
    > We abolished slavery a few centuries ago. Slavery has never been abolished. It was simply made illegal in most places under most circumstances. By any definition of slavery there are more people in bondage today than at any time in the past. Even taking your claim of abolition at face value, the only reason chattel slavery was "abolished" in the US was because its abolition became a way of ending a particularly bloody war by taking away one sides motive for fighting. Before that (i.e. before a majority of the citizenry saw abolition as benefitting themselves) there was not enough popular support for abolition.
    • ekianjo 8y ago
      More people in bondage? in absolute numbers this is captain obvious level of argument since we have had a demographic explosion in the 20th century. Percentage wise you would be way wrong since poverty has been steadily decreasing everywhere around the world and very rapidly.
• michaelmrose 8y ago
  The fairness doctrine makes little sense in the context of the internet. My random comment/post on reddit may in the course of a paragraph contain 5 different assumptions that may be orthogonal to the actual main point. It will not contain therein space for alternative thoughts on the main point let alone space for any alternatives for any unexamined assumptions. Truth is multidimensional and fairness impossible to determine to everyone's satisfaction. For example 2 people discussing the best way to travel around the world are unlikely to find agreement with someone who believes the earth is flat and impossible to fly around and 2 different types of dating artifacts are equally meaningless to someone who believes the earth is 6000 years old. Alternative viewpoints can find themselves a home in the comment section or if undesirable there on your own home on the web. Wherein the web isn't censored in a heavy handed fashion we have the most reasonable answer to the fairness doctrine. Everyone can be heard but not everyone will find an audience that desires to listen.
  • aninhumer 8y ago
    >Wherein the web isn't censored in a heavy handed fashion we have the most reasonable answer to the fairness doctrine. Everyone can be heard but not everyone will find an audience that desires to listen. But is that really reasonable or fair? What decides who will find an audience to listen to them? Free speech advocates seem to believe that the "best" speech will always find an audience, but I don't personally see any reason to believe that's true. When a rich person can pay for a political advert on a major television channel, and a poor person can only publish to a blog no one has any reason to know exists, do we really believe that the latter's ideas will spread more widely if they are "better"? I think people are starting to realise that access to an audience is far more important than the simple freedom to say something, and that this access is already heavily restricted in a variety of ways other than government intervention. But unlike the mere ability to speak, access to an audience is fundamentally limited. It's physically impossible for everyone to hear everyone else's views. So a simple idea like "Freedom of Speech" is not sufficient to allow us to decide how to structure our societal discourse.
    • michaelmrose 8y ago
• jernfrost 8y ago
  In Norway the media has an ethics organization they vuluntarily join, which may make rulings on whether a news organization has abused their power or not. It doesn’t carry any actual punishment to my knowledge but it is a public embarrasment so media try to respect its rulings.
  • da_chicken 8y ago
    That would be a good idea and I'd support that. The only problem I think is that such things tend to break down once the size of a country scales. Like I'm not surprised such a system works great in Norway; there's only ~5 million people! A lot of the systems that worked fantastically in the US when it had a few million people broke down once it reached 300 million. Representative government begins to break down when one man is responsible for representing 500,000 individuals intead of 30,000. Scale really fucks with things in unpredictable ways. It really makes you understand how China and India can have such widespread and pervasive problems.
• sametmax 8y ago
  > We have long required advertisers to be truthful, That didn't work at all. It just made advertisers sneakier. They still lie as much as they can, and when they can't, use tricks to focus peoples attention elsewhere, or move the ad on a medium where they can lie.