Introduction
Every six months or so, there’s another wave of clickbait and memes talking about “restore the Fairness Doctrine.” From this, one can reasonably conclude that there’s widespread support for this doctrine, and the public believes it should be “restored.” Even opportunistic politicians who know better will jump on this to give the impression they’re on the side of the people.
The public is wrong, and today we’re going to explore why.
“Wait,” some of you are thinking, “how can you possibly be against fairness?” That’s not what this is about, at all. Indeed, it’s the inherent lack of fairness that caused the thing to stop being enforced in the first place.
From the earliest days of broadcast media in the US, the FCC has had control over the “public airwaves,” ostensibly in the public interest. As part of this control, they developed and implemented the Fairness Doctrine. The airwaves were seen as a public resource, and the legal logic determined that the federal government, acting as the defender of the people’s interests, therefore had a right to regulate the content broadcast on those airwaves.
The wikipedia entry on FD summarizes it as well as I could: by the time it was implemented as a formal doctrine by the FCC in 1949, FD was “a policy that required the holders of broadcast licenses to both present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was—in the FCC’s view—honest, equitable, and balanced.”
The important phrase in that summary is “holders of broadcast licenses.” In the pre-cable era, all radio and television stations as well as the three major TV networks were required to purchase a license allowing them to broadcast on a given frequency. Adherence to FD was a contingency of that license, and if a broadcaster violated FD they were at risk of losing their broadcast license.
In the modern era, however, the majority of media is satellite radio, and cable and satellite television, and broadband internet. These media do not hold FCC broadcast licenses. You can’t revoke Fox News’ broadcast license (another empty pseudo-activist cry you’ll often see on social media), because they don’t have one. Instead they literally purchase specific bandwidth from the federal government, and they are then considered the owners of that bandwidth. It’s no longer “public airwaves,” but privately owned. This is more obvious in the case of cable television, but does also apply to satellite service – indeed, it’s probably fair to say that from a legal standpoint there’s no difference between the two, assuming both are privately owned rather than being owned and/or operated by the government (i.e. publicly).
Consequently, the FCC has exactly zero direct regulatory over content on these privately owned networks, and you do not want them to have that control. This concept is why you can see nudity on HBO, why you can order pornography from your local cable station, and why you can see other forms of “adult content,” be it sexually explicit or explicit violence, on your cable TV channels. It’s also what prevents the government from deciding that a Michael Moore documentary or a satire depicting national leaders in a bad light or a production of “1984” can’t be broadcast.
Digging Deeper: Why & How
The idea of protecting the “public airwaves” is based on the idea that, because that space is “public,” anyone with an operating receiver can access it, including children, with no further payment or access mechanism needed. The idea of not protecting private media in this way is based on the simple reality that you have to make a deliberate effort, and usually pay money, to access that content; your ten year old is not going to “accidentally” run into pornos on terrestrial radio or traditional television. Once you’ve paid for the service, the thinking goes, it’s up to you – not the service provider – to take the steps to ensure your kids (or you, or whomever) can’t access objectionable content. As an adult, you can choose to avoid that content; as a parent, you can employ an endless range of techniques to prevent your children from doing so.
It’s also well worth pointing out that the illegality of, for instance, child pornography or “snuff films” is not a function of FCC regulation but rather of other, existing laws. Those things are illegal outside the jurisdiction of the federal communication commission, therefore there’s no need for the FCC to create additional regulation forbidding them.
The FCC has no power at all to regulate the content on privately owned networks. They can’t tell HBO to not show boobs, they can’t tell your cable operator they’re not allowed to offer you “Resperm Of The Jedi.” That would be an egregious violation of the First Amendment; constitutionally, you have a right to create that content, and to view it, whether anyone else thinks it’s worthwhile or not, as long as other laws aren’t being violated in the process.
This brings us to the difficult reality of fairness doctrine: if you give the federal government the power to say Fox News can’t lie, you’re also giving them the power to say HBO can’t show nudity, or that I can’t criticize them on this website. Constitutionally there’s no way to have one regulation without making the other possible.
While we’re shutting down misunderstandings, the Fairness Doctrine was not “repealed by Reagan.” The FCC stopped enforcing it during the Reagan administration because it was patently unfair to terrestrial broadcasters; their ability to speak would be limited, but someone with enough money to make their own cable TV station (like Ted Turner and his then-emerging CNN) wouldn’t. Now you’ve created a money = freedom paradigm, and that can’t work in a free country. Any FCC rule created to regulate political speech would only apply to broadcast media – terrestrial radio and television, and the three “real” networks who actually own stations and distribute content to them. It would remain a free-for-all for everyone else.
The Fairness Doctrine was formally repealed by the Obama administration, because it was archaic, useless, and out of date.
If Not The Fairness Doctrine, Then What?
The solution is making the personal effort to become genuinely literate in media and information; to equip yourself with the tools to “think back” at misinformation and disinformation, to train your own mind not to simply accept a statement as true because it appeals to your biases, nor to reject it simply because it doesn’t.
Until we get our public education system back in working order so that this vital life skill is taught to all of us from the earliest age possible (for instance, we could start by teaching kids how to resist all the advertising aimed at them), the burden of that education is on each of us as individuals, and that can be a daunting task. It means breaking ourselves of the habit of trying to find push-button solutions to complex and difficult problems. It means admitting our fallibility and doing the hard work of setting aside our egos and pride, and it means spending a lot of time unlearning old falsehoods and re-learning some of the things we missed.
Modern Monetary Theory provides an excellent example for illustration. Most of us learned in middle school that Congress appropriates funding for all federal spending, but the reality that reveals went right past us. We still think of federal spending in terms of “my tax dollars,” but federal tax revenue doesn’t fund federal spending. Congress does. We know this, but we’re taught to avoid putting the pieces together to make a whole picture. We want to think of “our tax dollars” because we’re taught to believe that’s what gives us agency in government; that if we don’t pay taxes, we have no right to a voice. Problem is, that’s not true. Not only isn’t that true, but nothing that flows from that basic “spending my tax dollars” thinking is true. It’s not necessary to lay a heavy tax on the ultra-wealthy “to pay for” anything; the reason for progressive taxation is to stop too much money, and the power that goes with it, into too few hands. It doesn’t pay for anything; things are paid for when Congress says “pay for this,” and then the proper keystrokes are entered into the proper spreadsheets to create the dollars to “pay for this.”
It’s not the purpose of this article to get deep into MMT, but it does provide an example of the problems at hand, and their solutions. The primary problem at hand is we’ve been taught to think incorrectly; the primary solution at hand is to accept that reality and then do the work necessary to learn how to think correctly – to do the research, to be willing to admit to ourselves that we’ve been misled and misdirected, and to attain the knowledge necessary to fix it.
Fortunately, there are some excellent tools to help you achieve this. There are many, many books and websites out there dedicated to giving us those tools, but if I were to pick only one critical resource it would be a book by Robert Cialdini titled “Influence: Science and Practice. (disclosure: affiliate link)” This book not only gives an excellent foundation for identifying and neutralizing the compliance-gaining tactics employed by those who deliberately mislead, it’s also well-written to appeal to the casual reader as well as the academic, and the citations contained therein will take you through other important writing and writers like Korzybski’s theories of general semantics (a separate thing from basic semantics, the “meaning of meaning”), the theory of linguistic relativity (“communication creates reality”), and the work of philosophers and influencers like Edward Bernays (aka “the father of public relations.”)
If you visit and make studied use of the links in the above paragraph, you will develop the tools necessary to successfully resist attempts to disinform and misinform you, not in the sense that so many internet know-it-alls who get sucked in to ridiculous nonsense like QAnon and other conspiracy theories, but in a genuine, powerful way that will have a profound positive impact on how you process the information you consume.
That’s the solution to all of this, and it’s in your hands. Use it, and you’ll quickly stop relying on empty and unworkable but seductive “quick fix” ideas like restoring the fairness doctrine, and start vaccinating yourself against the overwhelming flow of disinformation that surrounds us all in the modern world.