3 ms·

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 a

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).
  - sclarisse 4y ago
    You are either talking about something unrelated to the original fairness doctrine (somewhat misleading) or you are flat out wrong about extant jurisprudence regarding the highest law of the land… or both. In either case you seem oblivious to the fact that the Supreme Court has already explicitly said that there are First Amendment concerns with the first amendment. In Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC for instance, they said that the doctrine “has the net effect of reducing rather than enhancing speech” and would be illegal save for the limited spectrum, as “a license permits broadcasting, but the licensee has no constitutional right to be the one who holds the license or to monopolize a radio frequency to the exclusion of his fellow citizens.” Contrast Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo where a roughly equivalent newspaper regulation was found unconstitutional because competition is free to deliver their views via their own newspaper and it is not a special monopoly power to be licensed. If a “will to properly govern” is involved then it will take far more than “good regulations,” it will take major substantive changes to the nation’s Constitution, with all that entails. It will not happen because the citizens of the nation still like that amendment and fear they will be exposed to abuse without it.
shadowgovt 4y ago
This is a key point that I worry is hard for modern users of the Internet to wrap their heads around: In that era, TV channels were a tightly-regulated, very-rare resource, and as a result the information carried upon them rapidly diffused to everyone because there simply weren't that many alternatives to turn to for information. In terms of the attention economy, attention was relatively cheap if you could get onto the channel; you had a completely captive audience with few distractions if they were using television at all. LeVar Burton once opined in an interview on NPR's Fresh Air that the most special thing about the miniseries Roots was that because of its timing, it's one of the last dramatizations on racism that more-or-less an entire generation of Americans experienced. Once cable brought the number of channels from dozens to hundreds (and HDTV later pushed it into the thousands), the cost to fixate a message in front of every household skyrocketed. There's more content than ever to experience, but the odds of any two people having experienced similar content have commensurately gone way down. It's entirely possible that the era of the cultural touchstone is nearly over (though firms like Disney certainly make a go of it with 300-million-plus dollar movie investments).

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).
- sclarisse 4y ago
  You are either talking about something unrelated to the original fairness doctrine (somewhat misleading) or you are flat out wrong about extant jurisprudence regarding the highest law of the land… or both. In either case you seem oblivious to the fact that the Supreme Court has already explicitly said that there are First Amendment concerns with the first amendment. In Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC for instance, they said that the doctrine “has the net effect of reducing rather than enhancing speech” and would be illegal save for the limited spectrum, as “a license permits broadcasting, but the licensee has no constitutional right to be the one who holds the license or to monopolize a radio frequency to the exclusion of his fellow citizens.” Contrast Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo where a roughly equivalent newspaper regulation was found unconstitutional because competition is free to deliver their views via their own newspaper and it is not a special monopoly power to be licensed. If a “will to properly govern” is involved then it will take far more than “good regulations,” it will take major substantive changes to the nation’s Constitution, with all that entails. It will not happen because the citizens of the nation still like that amendment and fear they will be exposed to abuse without it.

shadowgovt 4y ago

This is a key point that I worry is hard for modern users of the Internet to wrap their heads around: In that era, TV channels were a tightly-regulated, very-rare resource, and as a result the information carried upon them rapidly diffused to everyone because there simply weren't that many alternatives to turn to for information. In terms of the attention economy, attention was relatively cheap if you could get onto the channel; you had a completely captive audience with few distractions if they were using television at all. LeVar Burton once opined in an interview on NPR's Fresh Air that the most special thing about the miniseries Roots was that because of its timing, it's one of the last dramatizations on racism that more-or-less an entire generation of Americans experienced. Once cable brought the number of channels from dozens to hundreds (and HDTV later pushed it into the thousands), the cost to fixate a message in front of every household skyrocketed. There's more content than ever to experience, but the odds of any two people having experienced similar content have commensurately gone way down. It's entirely possible that the era of the cultural touchstone is nearly over (though firms like Disney certainly make a go of it with 300-million-plus dollar movie investments).