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.
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!
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.
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!