The other day California’s Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein proclaimed that she remembered a time when the Fairness Doctrine held sway over the broadcasting industry and added, “I think there was much more serious correct reporting to the people.”
She went on to say it might be a good thing if talk radio stations were compelled to be less one-sided and, well, more fair.
Feinstein’s memory is plainly flawed. The Golden Age she remembers never existed.
The Fairness Doctrine, the regulation that once required broadcast outlets to include opposing points of view when addressing controversial topics, didn’t, produce fairness then, nor is it likely to produce it any time in the future.
I once labored in radio and television and had a first-hand view of how the Fairness Doctrine affected news coverage. I concluded the doctrine effectively discouraged broadcasters from getting within artillery range of a controversial topic simply because their avoidance made life easier for everyone.
One of the things broadcasters were required to do was to solicit a response from anyone who had been criticized on the air. That person, if so inclined, was virtually able to have the same amount of time on the air as the original broadcast. If a broadcaster wanted to criticize, say, an oil company executive, that executive could make his or her response, often in a better time slot than the original broadcast. It made for a very clumsy exchange. Not surprisingly, broadcasters quickly figured out ways to either soften the criticism of individuals and corporations or leave them out altogether. Other favorite techniques involved hiding behind terse agency accounts or waiting for agencies to come forward with official statements that could be reported without difficulty. There was very little incentive for original reporting, especially of the type that required special balancing of interests to avoid government scrutiny at license renewal time.
The history of broadcast regulation from the 1920s to the 1980s, when the Fairness Doctrine was ended, shows a continuing conflict between the government and broadcasters over content and what constituted the public interest. On more than one occasion the issue reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
The cases before the nation’s highest court included all the questions being debated today, such as what right does the government have to demand certain conduct from broadcasters and how much, if any, should programming content be under government control.
In 1969, the Supreme Court upheld the validity of the Fairness Doctrine on the grounds that the regulation was reasonable given the scarcity of broadcast licenses. But over the next 15 years it became more obvious that the doctrine was having the effect of actually discouraging the treatment of controversial issues and the court virtually invited another case that would allow it to reconsider its first decision.
In the mid-1980s, the Federal Communications Commission issued a report that concluded the Fairness Doctrine was having a chilling effect upon public broadcasting and ultimately ended the regulation.
What followed was a transformation of the broadcast industry. There are now hundreds of mostly AM stations that live for talk, rather than for music.
It would be plainly impossible to imagine how those stations could survive under a regulation like the Fairness Doctrine but that doesn’t mean we are now living in a perfectly fair world.
Today’s problem is not even remotely the same as that of the earlier decades. Then there may have been a shortage of opinion. Today, there is a huge surplus.
Today’s problem is that a whole new generation is being told what to think before it has a factual basis worth thinking about. The assumption seems to be that an informed electorate can be created by exposure to shouted exchanges on radio and television.
That is not only doubtful, it isn’t fair.
Al Knight of Fairplay (alknight@
) is a former member of The Post’s editorial-page staff.
