5 ms·

In 1949 the FCC introduced the "Fairness Doctrine" that "required the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance an

by boh 4y ago

In 1949 the FCC introduced the "Fairness Doctrine" that "required the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that fairly reflected differing viewpoints". It was repealed in 1987. People in the mid-20th century actually had regulatory restraint on incendiary click-bait. It wasn't just optimism that produced trust. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

nerdponx 4y ago
This is a great example of an executive regulation that should have just been a law before they tried to repeal it. By the time Congress tried to make it a law, it was already a political issue and of course Reagan vetoed it, because the whole thing was orchestrated by his FCC appointees in the first place. See also: same-sex marriage rights, abortion rights, net neutrality, right to repair, et alia.
Dig1t 4y ago
A lot of people I talk to about this seem to dislike the idea. As a centrist, I love it, I think it would go a long way towards building more trust in news institutions, if they made a strong commitment to trying their best to present multiple viewpoints on an event and doing their best to not introduce bias into it.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
  The Fairness doctrine had the benefit of a) time, and b) very little competition. Taking TV alone as an example, TV news was limited to a distinct hourly slot and a handful of channels. News was much more polished and prerecorded as segments. The closest modern example is probably PBS Newshour. Once you introduce much more competition and the addictive allure of 24hr news, you get into a situation where an enormous amount of news is prioritized around bread crumbing stories because it's always "in the present, as it happens", and way more reactionary. Breaking News! now happens everyday. CNN even have a regularly scheduled timeblock called...."Breaking News!" Most modern news today is rather more like commentary for a sports game, fairness or usefulness to the public is secondary. Modern news with a fairness doctrine would probably be profoundly boring, which is good in its own way (I'm sure you would agree), but not something that makes a company like CNN a lot of money. Good journalism is expensive and laborious; cheap commentary on a 24hr stream is relatively cheap and easy.
  - sclarisse 4y ago
    There’s also the little matter of this thing called the first amendment. The reason the government could get away with having a Fairness Doctrine on broadcast TV was that there were only a few airwaves to be had, and only a few providers in certain markets. Today you can watch tons of channels on cable or satellite, and no end of content on the Internet. Such regulation could never be legally applied. And the fairness doctrine never really applied to newspapers — which instead sought centrism to broaden their distribution in a geographical-based market and attract more ad dollars. This is another trend towards centrism which has been rendered moot by the Internet, where firms compete for attention using partisanship — which has long been preferred by paying audiences (and was the norm in the 19th century newspaper).
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      The First Amendment had nothing to do with ending the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine had First Amendment carve outs, even: a station could air whatever opinion it wanted so long as it correctly labeled it an editorial opinion. (As opposed to just treating all opinions as facts and blurring all the lines between news, editorial content including opinions, and entertainment.) Such regulation could be legally applied to the internet. It may need a different agency to enforce it as the FCC only ever had the most control over broadcast airwaves (though the FCC still has some control over cellular bandwidth and broadband cabling and could use those as leverage), but basic regulations like "ads need to properly labeled; news needs to be properly labeled; editorial opinions need to be properly labeled" could absolutely still exist within the rights of the First Amendment. (The first Amendment is a nuanced thing and primarily designed between you a citizen and your government, every other kind of relationship is mostly just assumed beyond that, and some of it depends on whether you agree with the Citizens United decision that corporations are citizens and money is speech, which is a massive rabbit hole.) If there was a US Congress that wanted to regulate it, they absolutely could. The difference between 1949 and today has nothing to do with the First Amendment or technology changes and almost everything to do with a lack of will to properly govern with good regulations (and capitalism with no guiding hand regulation sinking to lowest common denominators for clickbait and attention seeking).
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  How do you define a controversial issue and even media for that matter? Does your tweet about the pizza you enjoyed last night need to include an asterisk about the children crazy people think are imprisoned in its imaginary basement? How do you define equal time? If you are trying to read about motorcycles do we need to inject enough pro/anti abortion articles to balance out the converse in your feed last night? So much of our media consumption isn't the evening news such a proposal has nearly no meaning and there is I think a larger issue. Many even most controversies aren't complex takes on deep issues. They are to be frank malicious bullshit. Taking pills to not continue a pregnancy isn't murder. There isn't a basement let alone kids under that pizza place. The election wasn't stolen. Societies without pervasive individual guns don't have people blowing away children meaning the issues with gun control are 99% logistical/legal. We could solve them we just willing and able to trade dead children for more freedom. There is zero moral implications to allowing gay marriage or gay adoption. Evolution is real as is systemic racism. Shall we designate a ministry of truth to decide what controversies we ought to teach or force our media to carry malicious lies?
  - Dig1t 4y ago
    Well you seem to have your own, very strongly held, beliefs about all of these topics. The pizza thing is obviously wrong, the vast majority of people know it's wrong. Censoring those kinds of crazy ideas in public discourse just emboldens its believers further because they see your censorship as an attempt to stop them from getting their "truth" out. I think it would be better to let them talk openly about their crazy pizza conspiracies, eventually they will encounter better arguments and lose. If you are saying that there is no nuance, no gray areas at all, to the topics of abortion, election integrity, gun ownership, etc then you are no better than the ideologues on Fox news, just in the opposite direction.
    - michaelmrose 4y ago
      More dialogue actually doesn't help conspiracy theorists learn better it just helps them spread their crazy to a broader audience which is why one in five Americans believe in some aspect of Qanon. It's not censorship to not spread the crazy. Let them spread it on their own platforms. There really is little nuance regarding election integrity. Trump definitively lost. The only disputes with a shred of substance were themselves procedural quibbles like arguing that a given legislature overstepped its authority by offering mail in balloting and attempting to use this to argue that the proper resolution to overreach would be to throw out the legitimately cast ballots of those following government instruction in order to reach claimants preferred outcome. Lets do abortion next. Almost all the meaningful brain development that produces a human like being rather than a human looking being happens in the third trimester whereas almost all abortions happen in the first and overwhelmingly consist of mom to be swallowing pills terminate something as intelligent as mold. The nuance was covered 50 years ago and then again and again with redundant laws designed to protect the fetus from fictional partial birth abortions that were already illegal twice or three times over. Having already achieved the goal of keeping human like beings from being killed decades prior there is little nuance left to deal with. If you have an hour we could do gun control too. I noticed you didn't mention the other controversies presumably because you don't regard them as meaningful controversies. Kudos.
- ch4s3 4y ago
  How could you trust something like the fairness doctrine in practice? The Kennedy administration for example created Citizens Committee for a Nuclear Test Ban to specifically file FCC complaints against broadcasters that aired criticism of the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Nixon used it as a whip against anti Vietnam War activists[1]. And one could go on, but it was intended to and used to suppress speech the government didn't like. Calling it the "Fairness Doctrine" is a great case of giving a malicious law a name that makes it sound unobjectionable, like the Patriot Act. [1] http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/03/07/politics_and_the_fairness_doctrine/ http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped...
- drewcoo 4y ago
  > present multiple viewpoints No. Not multiple viewpoints. Merely an opposing view. Of the station's choosing. So if your station's views are correct, and why wouldn't they be, then the best choice of opposing view is some crackpot, ideally not too offensive for the middle of the night.
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    You also have the "controlled opposition" option. "9/10 establishment approved policy experts think we should be balls deep in Vietnam. The 10th says just the tip"
Spooky23 4y ago
The funny thing is that made news very profitable. Local and national newspeople were widely admired figures in the community. Local news in particular is a cesspit of pretty people talking about weather calamity, PR placements and whomever got shot today. Eliminating the fairness doctrine opened the door for garbage content. That’s why Rush Limbaugh building off the fringe last night trucker talk show schtick became a force on hundreds of radio stations with millions of listeners in a time slot once dedicated to a half hour news segment and old ladies talking about knitting. Rush created the mold for editorial that sounded like news. He had a real talent for entertaining commentary and good production value. His copycats had less talent and went more extreme, once they hit the bottom for broadcast, guys like Alex Jones took to the internet.
- stuaxo 4y ago
  Indeed, good regulation grows the pie for everyone - of course the zero sun gamers want to take it all and push for the repeal of regulations.
- jimt1234 4y ago
  Rush Limbaugh once said that the whole point of his show was to "make the listener feel good." And doing so was the real reason for its success. He elaborated, saying his show wasn't meant to challenge the listener, but rather to support what the listener is already feeling. As much as I disagreed with him on just about everything, I gotta respect the honesty. And I think it describes where we are are with the news in America.
  - 7speter 4y ago
    Yeah a lot of mass media discourse reduces to reinforcing cognitive bias. Its why everyone thinks their side is actually fighting the good fight, and just by being on said side, they too, are very good.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    I worked in a farm in my early teens and listened to Rush all summer in the early 90s. He was legit funny and entertaining then, as long as you weren’t the punchline. When he was past his prime, divorced and hooked on drugs in the 2000s it was different and really awful.
ch4s3 4y ago
The Fairness Doctrine was an unconstitutional prior restraint on speech and was used to silence debate on the Vietnam War[1]. Moreover it was ridiculous, the idea of having a singular "public interest" makes no sense. Who could possibly have enough information and insight to define a singular "public interest" across all possible news topics? It was a relic of the age of central planning and followed from a history of the FCC denying licenses to radio stations that "editorialized" which meant broadcasting political speech that the FCC didn't like. The "pervasiveness argument" for the Fairness Doctrine is utterly nonsense[2], boiling down to the government having an overriding interest if speech is persuasive, which would limit freedom of speech only to private or unpersuasive speech which renders it no right at all. [1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/412/94/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/412/94/ [2] https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1033&context=fclj https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
- boh 4y ago
  Regulation isn't necessary to silence debates on unpopular wars (the past 20 yrs provides ample examples). "Freedom of speech" like the "public interest" isn't easily definable. Companies like Meta and Twitter are "free" to censure at will, but regardless of whatever claims they may make of their rights to this freedom, it negatively effects the freedom of others. In practice a loss of government regulation just yields the regulatory power to private interests. The choice unfortunately becomes not whether we choose regulation or "freedom" but who is granted regulatory rights: public or private interests.
  - ch4s3 4y ago
    Freedom of speech is pretty well defined in a century of US case law and in nearly 3 centuries of western political philosophy, the core is government restrain of speech. When you shift focus to moderation on social media you're in the territory of a "culture of free speech" which I agree is a mushier and harder to define thing. The key difference is that the government can put you in jail, or confiscate your property whereas Facebook and only harass you within the confines of Facebook.

by boh 4y ago

nerdponx 4y ago

This is a great example of an executive regulation that should have just been a law before they tried to repeal it. By the time Congress tried to make it a law, it was already a political issue and of course Reagan vetoed it, because the whole thing was orchestrated by his FCC appointees in the first place. See also: same-sex marriage rights, abortion rights, net neutrality, right to repair, et alia.

Dig1t 4y ago

A lot of people I talk to about this seem to dislike the idea. As a centrist, I love it, I think it would go a long way towards building more trust in news institutions, if they made a strong commitment to trying their best to present multiple viewpoints on an event and doing their best to not introduce bias into it.

beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
The Fairness doctrine had the benefit of a) time, and b) very little competition. Taking TV alone as an example, TV news was limited to a distinct hourly slot and a handful of channels. News was much more polished and prerecorded as segments. The closest modern example is probably PBS Newshour. Once you introduce much more competition and the addictive allure of 24hr news, you get into a situation where an enormous amount of news is prioritized around bread crumbing stories because it's always "in the present, as it happens", and way more reactionary. Breaking News! now happens everyday. CNN even have a regularly scheduled timeblock called...."Breaking News!" Most modern news today is rather more like commentary for a sports game, fairness or usefulness to the public is secondary. Modern news with a fairness doctrine would probably be profoundly boring, which is good in its own way (I'm sure you would agree), but not something that makes a company like CNN a lot of money. Good journalism is expensive and laborious; cheap commentary on a 24hr stream is relatively cheap and easy.
- sclarisse 4y ago
  There’s also the little matter of this thing called the first amendment. The reason the government could get away with having a Fairness Doctrine on broadcast TV was that there were only a few airwaves to be had, and only a few providers in certain markets. Today you can watch tons of channels on cable or satellite, and no end of content on the Internet. Such regulation could never be legally applied. And the fairness doctrine never really applied to newspapers — which instead sought centrism to broaden their distribution in a geographical-based market and attract more ad dollars. This is another trend towards centrism which has been rendered moot by the Internet, where firms compete for attention using partisanship — which has long been preferred by paying audiences (and was the norm in the 19th century newspaper).
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    The First Amendment had nothing to do with ending the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine had First Amendment carve outs, even: a station could air whatever opinion it wanted so long as it correctly labeled it an editorial opinion. (As opposed to just treating all opinions as facts and blurring all the lines between news, editorial content including opinions, and entertainment.) Such regulation could be legally applied to the internet. It may need a different agency to enforce it as the FCC only ever had the most control over broadcast airwaves (though the FCC still has some control over cellular bandwidth and broadband cabling and could use those as leverage), but basic regulations like "ads need to properly labeled; news needs to be properly labeled; editorial opinions need to be properly labeled" could absolutely still exist within the rights of the First Amendment. (The first Amendment is a nuanced thing and primarily designed between you a citizen and your government, every other kind of relationship is mostly just assumed beyond that, and some of it depends on whether you agree with the Citizens United decision that corporations are citizens and money is speech, which is a massive rabbit hole.) If there was a US Congress that wanted to regulate it, they absolutely could. The difference between 1949 and today has nothing to do with the First Amendment or technology changes and almost everything to do with a lack of will to properly govern with good regulations (and capitalism with no guiding hand regulation sinking to lowest common denominators for clickbait and attention seeking).
michaelmrose 4y ago
How do you define a controversial issue and even media for that matter? Does your tweet about the pizza you enjoyed last night need to include an asterisk about the children crazy people think are imprisoned in its imaginary basement? How do you define equal time? If you are trying to read about motorcycles do we need to inject enough pro/anti abortion articles to balance out the converse in your feed last night? So much of our media consumption isn't the evening news such a proposal has nearly no meaning and there is I think a larger issue. Many even most controversies aren't complex takes on deep issues. They are to be frank malicious bullshit. Taking pills to not continue a pregnancy isn't murder. There isn't a basement let alone kids under that pizza place. The election wasn't stolen. Societies without pervasive individual guns don't have people blowing away children meaning the issues with gun control are 99% logistical/legal. We could solve them we just willing and able to trade dead children for more freedom. There is zero moral implications to allowing gay marriage or gay adoption. Evolution is real as is systemic racism. Shall we designate a ministry of truth to decide what controversies we ought to teach or force our media to carry malicious lies?
- Dig1t 4y ago
  Well you seem to have your own, very strongly held, beliefs about all of these topics. The pizza thing is obviously wrong, the vast majority of people know it's wrong. Censoring those kinds of crazy ideas in public discourse just emboldens its believers further because they see your censorship as an attempt to stop them from getting their "truth" out. I think it would be better to let them talk openly about their crazy pizza conspiracies, eventually they will encounter better arguments and lose. If you are saying that there is no nuance, no gray areas at all, to the topics of abortion, election integrity, gun ownership, etc then you are no better than the ideologues on Fox news, just in the opposite direction.
  - michaelmrose 4y ago
    More dialogue actually doesn't help conspiracy theorists learn better it just helps them spread their crazy to a broader audience which is why one in five Americans believe in some aspect of Qanon. It's not censorship to not spread the crazy. Let them spread it on their own platforms. There really is little nuance regarding election integrity. Trump definitively lost. The only disputes with a shred of substance were themselves procedural quibbles like arguing that a given legislature overstepped its authority by offering mail in balloting and attempting to use this to argue that the proper resolution to overreach would be to throw out the legitimately cast ballots of those following government instruction in order to reach claimants preferred outcome. Lets do abortion next. Almost all the meaningful brain development that produces a human like being rather than a human looking being happens in the third trimester whereas almost all abortions happen in the first and overwhelmingly consist of mom to be swallowing pills terminate something as intelligent as mold. The nuance was covered 50 years ago and then again and again with redundant laws designed to protect the fetus from fictional partial birth abortions that were already illegal twice or three times over. Having already achieved the goal of keeping human like beings from being killed decades prior there is little nuance left to deal with. If you have an hour we could do gun control too. I noticed you didn't mention the other controversies presumably because you don't regard them as meaningful controversies. Kudos.
ch4s3 4y ago
How could you trust something like the fairness doctrine in practice? The Kennedy administration for example created Citizens Committee for a Nuclear Test Ban to specifically file FCC complaints against broadcasters that aired criticism of the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Nixon used it as a whip against anti Vietnam War activists[1]. And one could go on, but it was intended to and used to suppress speech the government didn't like. Calling it the "Fairness Doctrine" is a great case of giving a malicious law a name that makes it sound unobjectionable, like the Patriot Act. [1] http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/03/07/politics_and_the_fairness_doctrine/ http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped...
drewcoo 4y ago
> present multiple viewpoints No. Not multiple viewpoints. Merely an opposing view. Of the station's choosing. So if your station's views are correct, and why wouldn't they be, then the best choice of opposing view is some crackpot, ideally not too offensive for the middle of the night.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  You also have the "controlled opposition" option. "9/10 establishment approved policy experts think we should be balls deep in Vietnam. The 10th says just the tip"

Spooky23 4y ago

The funny thing is that made news very profitable. Local and national newspeople were widely admired figures in the community. Local news in particular is a cesspit of pretty people talking about weather calamity, PR placements and whomever got shot today. Eliminating the fairness doctrine opened the door for garbage content. That’s why Rush Limbaugh building off the fringe last night trucker talk show schtick became a force on hundreds of radio stations with millions of listeners in a time slot once dedicated to a half hour news segment and old ladies talking about knitting. Rush created the mold for editorial that sounded like news. He had a real talent for entertaining commentary and good production value. His copycats had less talent and went more extreme, once they hit the bottom for broadcast, guys like Alex Jones took to the internet.

stuaxo 4y ago
Indeed, good regulation grows the pie for everyone - of course the zero sun gamers want to take it all and push for the repeal of regulations.
jimt1234 4y ago
Rush Limbaugh once said that the whole point of his show was to "make the listener feel good." And doing so was the real reason for its success. He elaborated, saying his show wasn't meant to challenge the listener, but rather to support what the listener is already feeling. As much as I disagreed with him on just about everything, I gotta respect the honesty. And I think it describes where we are are with the news in America.
- 7speter 4y ago
  Yeah a lot of mass media discourse reduces to reinforcing cognitive bias. Its why everyone thinks their side is actually fighting the good fight, and just by being on said side, they too, are very good.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  I worked in a farm in my early teens and listened to Rush all summer in the early 90s. He was legit funny and entertaining then, as long as you weren’t the punchline. When he was past his prime, divorced and hooked on drugs in the 2000s it was different and really awful.

ch4s3 4y ago

The Fairness Doctrine was an unconstitutional prior restraint on speech and was used to silence debate on the Vietnam War[1]. Moreover it was ridiculous, the idea of having a singular "public interest" makes no sense. Who could possibly have enough information and insight to define a singular "public interest" across all possible news topics? It was a relic of the age of central planning and followed from a history of the FCC denying licenses to radio stations that "editorialized" which meant broadcasting political speech that the FCC didn't like. The "pervasiveness argument" for the Fairness Doctrine is utterly nonsense[2], boiling down to the government having an overriding interest if speech is persuasive, which would limit freedom of speech only to private or unpersuasive speech which renders it no right at all. [1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/412/94/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/412/94/ [2] https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1033&context=fclj https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...

boh 4y ago
Regulation isn't necessary to silence debates on unpopular wars (the past 20 yrs provides ample examples). "Freedom of speech" like the "public interest" isn't easily definable. Companies like Meta and Twitter are "free" to censure at will, but regardless of whatever claims they may make of their rights to this freedom, it negatively effects the freedom of others. In practice a loss of government regulation just yields the regulatory power to private interests. The choice unfortunately becomes not whether we choose regulation or "freedom" but who is granted regulatory rights: public or private interests.
- ch4s3 4y ago
  Freedom of speech is pretty well defined in a century of US case law and in nearly 3 centuries of western political philosophy, the core is government restrain of speech. When you shift focus to moderation on social media you're in the territory of a "culture of free speech" which I agree is a mushier and harder to define thing. The key difference is that the government can put you in jail, or confiscate your property whereas Facebook and only harass you within the confines of Facebook.