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1. It addresses the poisonous corporate practice of media MONOPOLIES, restricts those monopolies with serious reforms, and encourages small and local businesses in the use of the public airwaves.
2. It re-instates the Fairness Doctrine, which means that any business operating airwaves that belong to the public, MUST present issues of public importance in a fair and balanced way. If the owners advocate a point of view, through their news shows or commentary, or allow others to do so, they must give EQUAL TIME to the opposing view.
Media monopolies
The benefits of busting up monopolies are so obvious, I won't go into them, except to say that busting up MEDIA monopolies is especially important to a democracy. Our democracy might be able to weather monopolies that sell us our lattes, or our sweatshirts, or even oil, but news and opinion are quite another matter. Accurate news and a wide range of opinion are an essential component of democracy--as important as transparent vote counting. Having neither of these things, at the moment--and for a long time now--can we really call ourselves a democracy?
The Fairness Doctrine
In practice, what the Fairness Doctrine meant, before Reagan killed the Fairness Doctrine (and I remember those days), businesses and corporations who were deemed worthy to receive a license to use our public airwaves, carefully separated news from opinion, and also guarded news from being influenced by sponsors or the broadcast corporation's own view of the government and politics. There was a respect for journalism, for investigative reporting, for facts--even or especially hard facts. Journalists, reporters, anchors had clout with their networks on issues of independence and integrity. The broadcasters were required to provide public service programming, and understood that they had a obligation to serve the common interest. They also sought out spokespeople for alternative and opposing views, so as to demonstrate their worthiness for the license. (The Bill in question re-instates this aspect of Fairness as well--the broadcaster has to report frequently and truthfully what their public service has been).
The Fairness Doctrine had wide-spread influence. It made newspapers and news magazines better--though they were, of course, not obligated by law to be fair. They often tried to be fair, anyway, in order to compete with TV/radio news organizations for credibility and for a wide readership (many views). Like the networks, they separated news and opinion, to maintain the integrity of the news. The Fairness Doctrine encouraged both broadcast and print media to pour resources into their news and opinion divisions, to compete with each other on investigations and real scoops--especially about official wrong-doing. Thus, the Washington Post was the envy of the news media, when they broke and assiduously followed up the famous and explosive Watergate story, and the New York Times was the pride of the nation when it courageously published the Pentagon Papers (exposing the lies and horrors of the Vietnam War), against the wishes of the Nixon government (and legal action).
There were failures. For instance, alternative or opposing views did not include communism, or even socialism to the left of FDR. Communism was anathematized, and communists were criminalized and persecuted. However, to TV's credit, it was a TV show--the Ed Murrow Show--which finally put an end to red-baiting and the McCarthyite hysteria of the era. But a communist country like Vietnam was never fairly portrayed. You had to read books to find out that Vietnamese communism was a far cry from Soviet or Chinese communism--or to find out that our own U.S. government had nixed UN-sponsored elections in Vietnam, which Ho Chi Minh would have won. He was a great independence war hero, and a communist, but a home-grown one, who would have allied with us, or at least would have been a neutral in the Cold War, if we had only supported their democracy. He begged us to! Virtually none of this was presented in our media, and it was impossible for most Americans to know it. TV news shows did, though, bring the horror of the Vietnam War right into our living rooms. We saw it first hand, and we saw the body bags coming back on the planes. News reporters felt an obligation to tell the truth, and they had Fairness Doctrine backing to do so, when dealing with their bosses. The same is true of the civil rights movement, and also of the protests against the Vietnam War--all fully covered by the media, both broadcast and print.
Another failure of the media--and of the Fairness Doctrine--was the JFK assassination, and five years later, the RFK and MLK assassinations. The Fairness Doctrine began to fail at that point--early 1970s--and good investigative reporting, independent journalism and a balance of views probably started dying in this country, with our dead progressive leaders, and the utter failure to question the government's official stories about their murders. This was simultaneous with Watergate. After that, the media became increasingly the propaganda tool of multinational corporations, as they slowly eroded the anti-monopoly laws. They "swift-boated" Jimmy Carter (Kerry wasn't the first), and permitted Reagan to commit treason, in several ways--getting the Iranian U.S. hostage takers to hold onto the hostages until after the 1980 Carter-Reagan election was over; violating Congress' specific ban against a war on Nicaragua, selling arms to Iran to generate money for the illegal war (also by CIA drug trafficking), and--probably worst of all, they let Reagan get away with complicity in the slaughter of two-hundred thousand Mayan villagers in Guatemala, with not a whisper in the news. I was an adult and politically knowledgeable by then, and I didn't know about it until recently. The networks also began to make rather a mockery of the Fairness Doctrine, by broadcasting "opposing views" very late at night, just before they went off the air--in boring, droning speeches that most viewers avoided like the plague.
It was something of an anti-climax, then, when Reagan deep-sixed the Fairness Doctrine. The spirit of it was essentially dead by the time he did so--although it still contained the vestiges of potential legal redress, if broadcasters openly violated it, and the basis for a rebirth of good journalism and good political discussion, if it had not been destroyed.
We have seen the result of that destruction, these last eight years, in the Bush junta--with no media feeling any requirement to present a balanced view. We have slaughtered a million people in Iraq--forgetting all of the lessons of Vietnam (well, the people didn't forget them, but the media sure did). We are ten trillion dollars in debt (and counting), as the result of massive, mindboggling theft by the rich and by our own leaders (if you can call them that). We are facing Great Depression II. And I think all of these things can be laid at the door of the war profiteering corporate 'news' monopolies, who convinced us that we were powerless, that war was inevitable and that massive looting was normal.
Just think of how far the New York Times has fallen, since the end of the Fairness Doctrine--from their high point of courage and rugged defense of the truth in the publication of the Pentagon Papers, to their outright lies, day after day, about WMDs in Iraq, and their withholding of the story of massive domestic spying by the NSA until after the 2004 election.
And the Washington Post has become even more of a disgrace--if that is possible. As for TV/radio, it is, as once was said of commercial TV, for far less reason, "a vast wasteland." The dingbat/brownshirt news. The bobble-headed/nazi news. It. Is. Horrible.
Rep. Henchey's bill--restoring the Fairness Doctrine--won't change this overnight, and change will require a vigilant FCC and public. But it can be done. And we have, at the same time, to work on the cultures at work within media organizations, and within media and all corporations, to really achieve what we want--not token bullshit, or sneakily limited debate, but real fairness and balance, and a restoration of citizen access to our public airwaves. We have to restore the culture of honest journalism, in support of the Fairness Doctrine. The internet has filled the black hole that the corporations and Reagan created--a hole that sucks in all light, the hole where the real news should be. It has certainly galvanized the public. But our people are still confused and oppressed by the 24/7 fascist propaganda that they are subjected to, in the powerful, imagistic TV medium that invades every home, and in one putridly fascist radio show after another. We see what the people can do with a free medium--the internet. TV and radio should be equally vibrant and democratic.
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