Oh, but you are right that some things don’t have two sides. I call it the “if someone says there’s gravity, we have to have an anti-gravity position.”
Yes, they should not have allowed Lemon to be tied in with Tucker. But you know, it is often misunderstood why the Fairness Doctrine was eliminated. What happened is that with all the multitude of “voices” —broadcast, cable, Online etc — there was no legal justification for forcing regulated broadcasters to provide equal time. It was going to be swept out by the courts. The challenge is to create a fairness provision, applying to all media, that can stand up in court.
Peter, thanks for reading. Yes, I know that the excuse for changing Fairness was a plethora of media, and it didn't apply to cable. There's some sophistry around that position, though. Another way of approaching Fairness in the 80s would have been to apply it to cable television, and later to streaming. The problem we have today is that people who get their news from either the lower-right or lower-left corners of the Media Bias Chart are not exposed to alternative viewpoints.
An important point to note: the Fairness Doctrine only applies to broadcast because it was a stipulation of being granted a license. It mandates that controversial issues be granted airing, and that if certain claims were made about a person, a response had to be made available on that person’s behalf. That’s what led to the equal time requirement for political candidates a decade later in 1959 candidates. It wasn’t formally scrapped until 2001, but in any event, it didn’t apply to cable, so we’d still have Fox and CNN. What we wouldn’t have had is Rush Limbaugh on AM radio starting... 1987!
Jim, you and Peter Krasilovsky were clearly on the same wavelength today. The alternate universe in which we never had extremely partisan radio (and Spock had a beard) sounds like it would have been a better universe to me. As I said to Peter, a better solution would be to apply fairness regardless of media channel so that people who primarily get their news from partisan sources on either side of the aisle are at least aware of alternative viewpoints. Fox did not, for example, amply cover the fact that they had to pay nearly $800M in a settlement on their own programming. With Fairness, one of the alternate points of view providers might have mentioned it.
The genuine “fair and balanced” approach to, and presentation of, what we call news that a Fairness Doctrine-like regulation of the kind you suggest for all media requires a reframing of what “media” is; specifically electronic media. Broadcast media has always existed in this amorphous state of being both a public service and a private enterprise. Enforcing public service functions on a private enterprise is never clean and clear. And when that enterprise’s raison d’être is the transmission of “speech,” that enforcement gets even dirtier. The reframing will be to settle just what media is, business or public service. Choosing ‘c,’ both, will necessarily restrict the business end because it will necessarily restrict the kinds of product media can produce to serve its economic interests. Using Fox as the example, it’s success is because it offers a product and audience wants to buy, exchanging time and attention for content, which is in turn exchanged for big bucks from advertisers and leverage in licensing negotiations with cable carriers. Some kind of hybrid of a Fairness mandate that applies to a specific category of content, I.e. whatever is called news, could be rolled out, but next up are battled over what’s news, free speech, and government control of media. Traditional broadcasters will have less of a problem with this because they have other product to offer. FOXNews is just... FOXNews. Under a Fairness mandate that applies to discrete content types means Fox would have to distinguish and disclose which content is which (makes one wonder if divesting from entertainment and going all-in in news was such a good idea).
I’d love to see what we call news more “facts assembled into information” than being a highly non-randomized and decontextualized facts framed to advance only opinions. But it’ll require a huge paradigm shift that I don’t think the politics of the day can instigate.
Oh, but you are right that some things don’t have two sides. I call it the “if someone says there’s gravity, we have to have an anti-gravity position.”
Yes, they should not have allowed Lemon to be tied in with Tucker. But you know, it is often misunderstood why the Fairness Doctrine was eliminated. What happened is that with all the multitude of “voices” —broadcast, cable, Online etc — there was no legal justification for forcing regulated broadcasters to provide equal time. It was going to be swept out by the courts. The challenge is to create a fairness provision, applying to all media, that can stand up in court.
Peter, thanks for reading. Yes, I know that the excuse for changing Fairness was a plethora of media, and it didn't apply to cable. There's some sophistry around that position, though. Another way of approaching Fairness in the 80s would have been to apply it to cable television, and later to streaming. The problem we have today is that people who get their news from either the lower-right or lower-left corners of the Media Bias Chart are not exposed to alternative viewpoints.
An important point to note: the Fairness Doctrine only applies to broadcast because it was a stipulation of being granted a license. It mandates that controversial issues be granted airing, and that if certain claims were made about a person, a response had to be made available on that person’s behalf. That’s what led to the equal time requirement for political candidates a decade later in 1959 candidates. It wasn’t formally scrapped until 2001, but in any event, it didn’t apply to cable, so we’d still have Fox and CNN. What we wouldn’t have had is Rush Limbaugh on AM radio starting... 1987!
Jim, you and Peter Krasilovsky were clearly on the same wavelength today. The alternate universe in which we never had extremely partisan radio (and Spock had a beard) sounds like it would have been a better universe to me. As I said to Peter, a better solution would be to apply fairness regardless of media channel so that people who primarily get their news from partisan sources on either side of the aisle are at least aware of alternative viewpoints. Fox did not, for example, amply cover the fact that they had to pay nearly $800M in a settlement on their own programming. With Fairness, one of the alternate points of view providers might have mentioned it.
The genuine “fair and balanced” approach to, and presentation of, what we call news that a Fairness Doctrine-like regulation of the kind you suggest for all media requires a reframing of what “media” is; specifically electronic media. Broadcast media has always existed in this amorphous state of being both a public service and a private enterprise. Enforcing public service functions on a private enterprise is never clean and clear. And when that enterprise’s raison d’être is the transmission of “speech,” that enforcement gets even dirtier. The reframing will be to settle just what media is, business or public service. Choosing ‘c,’ both, will necessarily restrict the business end because it will necessarily restrict the kinds of product media can produce to serve its economic interests. Using Fox as the example, it’s success is because it offers a product and audience wants to buy, exchanging time and attention for content, which is in turn exchanged for big bucks from advertisers and leverage in licensing negotiations with cable carriers. Some kind of hybrid of a Fairness mandate that applies to a specific category of content, I.e. whatever is called news, could be rolled out, but next up are battled over what’s news, free speech, and government control of media. Traditional broadcasters will have less of a problem with this because they have other product to offer. FOXNews is just... FOXNews. Under a Fairness mandate that applies to discrete content types means Fox would have to distinguish and disclose which content is which (makes one wonder if divesting from entertainment and going all-in in news was such a good idea).
I’d love to see what we call news more “facts assembled into information” than being a highly non-randomized and decontextualized facts framed to advance only opinions. But it’ll require a huge paradigm shift that I don’t think the politics of the day can instigate.