Thread by @VWPickard

For obvious reasons, the Fairness Doctrine has been coming up a lot recently. It is perhaps the most famous--and most maligned and misunderstood--media policy ever enacted in the US. Here's an article I wrote a few years ago on its long, strange history: ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc…

Here are some key takeaways from this research: The Fairness Doctrine’s longer history, especially its origins in the 1940s, is generally not well known. To the extent that it does persist in public memory, it's often conflated with the “equal time” rule for political candidates.

But the FD's purpose was more progressive than simply requiring 2 sides to a debate: It stipulated that broadcasters must cover controversial issues of public importance in ways that presented opposing perspectives, thus privileging an audience's rights to diverse voices & views.

Although the FD's effectiveness & enforceability are debatable, it encouraged sensitivity toward programming biases & provided local communities a tool for holding broadcasters accountable. Led to key progressive victories over time, but many conservatives also valued & used it.

Activists used the FD to help combat racist broadcasting, most notably in the WLBT case. The FD was also used to contest advertising for tobacco and other controversial products. In 1969, the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the FD’s legitimacy in its Red Lion decision.

SC determined that public access to a rich marketplace of ideas takes precedence, stating “It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount”. Rarely have positive freedoms been so clearly articulated in US legal/policy discourse.

By the 1980s, the tide began to turn against the FD. Bork and Scalia weakened it in a 1984 DC Circuit Court decision. Reagan vetoed congress's attempt to codify the FD into law (supported even by the likes of Rep Newt Gingrich). In 1987, the FCC officially repealed the FD.

The FD’s removal was one key factor leading to an explosion of right-wing radio programming. Conservatives also began deploying the FD rhetorically as code for regulatory overreach, so that any public interest media protection was branded as a new FD and vehemently contested.

Limbaugh saw it as an attempt to "Hush Rush" and market libertarians have invoked it against even the most benign and unrelated media policies. #NetNeutrality was dubbed “a Fairness Doctrine for the Internet.” Over time, even many progressives began distancing themselves from it.

It's understandable why liberals became increasingly leery of the FD. Conservatives had so successfully (albeit unfairly) stigmatized it that it had become a red herring at best and many folks on the Left (myself included) preferred more structural remedies to content regulation.

But dismissing FD out of hand at least implicitly validates contentions that gov has no legitimate role in regulating media markets, preventing social harms & protecting positive freedoms. Worth recalling that gov censorship isn't only threat-also corporate & "market censorship".

Ultimately, the FD was an imperfect but legitimate attempt to prevent predictable biases that emerge in highly commercialized media systems that tend toward monopoly control. Early reformers saw what would happen to broadcasting & sought to maintain a modicum of media diversity.

Much more to all of this, but I'll conclude that, in my view, building noncommercial, democratized alternatives are preferable to placing regulatory band aids on existing run-amok systems. But we still must deal with dangerous concentrations of unaccountable media power....

If nothing else, recent events should cause us to reexamine our assumptions about relationships between First Amendment, corporate power, content regulation, and democracy. Looking at historical debates around the Fairness Doctrine can help us think through these problems [End].