GOP Has Reason To Fear Fairness Doctrine

by Nicholas Johnson

Blog for Iowa is committed to reform of the broken media and in that spirit, we've recently posted a fair amount of our own commentary as well as articles from elsewhere about the Fairness Doctrine:  Harkin v. King on The Fairness Doctrine;   Study: Localism Key to Correcting Talk Radio Imbalance;   Take The Broadcaster Freedom (To Monopolize Our Airwaves) Act Out Of The DC Voting Rights Bill;   GOP Tries to Censor Free Speech While Pretending They Are For It; Conservative Pundits Fear Return of Fairness Doctrine.

Well, here's commentary from someone who actually knows what he's talking about.  The following is an excerpt from an article that can be found on the author's blog, FromDC2Iowa.  You should head on over there to read the entire piece, which includes some of the Fairness Doctrine's history, and not just the stuff everyone knows about.  It also appeared as an Op Ed in the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

~ For reasons difficult to fathom, some Republicans fear a born-again Fairness Doctrine.

For the last 30 years, Washington’s Republicans — and Democrats — have been working the horses hard as they drove their buggy toward the mirage of the promised land of their dreams: “marketplace deregulation.” Now they’ve taken that buggy over the inevitable cliff, and the resulting global economic collapse is only one of the costly consequences.

Loss of common-sense media regulation is another.

Iowa’s Herbert Hoover, that great lefty radical, was the secretary of commerce who was asked by the radio industry to please regulate it. Out of Hoover’s “radio conferences” of the 1920s came the broadcasters’ recommendations, enacted as the Radio Act of 1927.

Broadcasters recognized they were being licensed to profit from public property, the airwaves, and that the privilege carried with it a public responsibility. From the beginning, an evolving Fairness Doctrine has been considered a central feature of that responsibility. For 30 years, its application was seldom if ever questioned by the public, broadcasters, FCC, courts or Congress.

When challenged in the Supreme Court in 1969, the court shocked broadcasters by unanimously upholding the doctrine’s constitutionality. (Lower courts subsequently ruled the Federal Communications Commission had the authority to repeal it. The FCC’s deregulation revolution swept away the Fairness Doctrine.)

Misunderstandings about the Fairness Doctrine abound.

There are many reasons it couldn’t have been used to censor, let alone cancel, Rush Limbaugh.

For starters, it didn’t apply to talk show hosts — or any other programmers. They’re not licensed by the FCC. It was only a requirement for over-the-air radio and TV stations’ overall programming.

The FCC didn’t monitor programming for violations. It depended on citizen complaints. Few, if any, stations have ever lost a license or suffered serious sanction for a mere fairness violation.

All it forbid, in effect, was the private use of this licensed, community resource as an unrelieved mouthpiece of one-sided propaganda. [Note from BFIA –  you can see why the GOP is so concerned.]

The Fairness Doctrine: It’s not just a good idea, it ought to be the law — again.

Click here to read the rest of the article.