End of the Fairness Doctrine: death of the free press?

FAIRNESS DOCTRINE

U.S. Broadcasting Policy

The policy of the United States Federal Communications Commission that became known as the "Fairness Doctrine" is an attempt to ensure that all coverage of controversial issues by a broadcast station be balanced and fair. The FCC took the view, in 1949, that station licensees were "public trustees," and as such had an obligation to afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of contrasting points of view on controversial issues of public importance. The Commission later held that stations were also obligated to actively seek out issues of importance to their community and air programming that addressed those issues. With the deregulation sweep of the Reagan Administration during the 1980s, the Commission dissolved the fairness doctrine.

This doctrine grew out of concern that because of the large number of applications for radio station being submitted and the limited number of frequencies available, broadcasters should make sure they did not use their stations simply as advocates with a singular perspective. Rather, they must allow all points of view. That requirement was to be enforced by FCC mandate.

From the early 1940s, the FCC had established the "Mayflower Doctrine," which prohibited editorializing by stations. But that absolute ban softened somewhat by the end of the decade, allowing editorializing only if other points of view were aired, balancing that of the station's. During these years, the FCC had established dicta and case law guiding the operation of the doctrine.

In ensuing years the FCC ensured that the doctrine was operational by laying out rules defining such matters as personal attack and political editorializing (1967). In 1971 the Commission set requirements for the stations to report, with their license renewal, efforts to seek out and address issues of concern to the community. This process became known as "Ascertainment of Community Needs," and was to be done systematically and by the station management.

The fairness doctrine ran parallel to Section 315 of the Communications Act of 1937 which required stations to offer "equal opportunity" to all legally qualified political candidates for any office if they had allowed any person running in that office to use the station. The attempt was to balance--to force an even handedness. Section 315 exempted news programs, interviews and documentaries. But the doctrine would include such efforts. Another major difference should be noted here: Section 315 was federal law, passed by Congress. The fairness doctrine was simply FCC policy.

The FCC fairness policy was given great credence by the 1969 U.S. Supreme Court case of Red Lion Broadcasting Co., Inc. v. FCC. In that case, a station in Pennsylvania, licensed by Red Lion Co., had aired a "Christian Crusade" program wherein an author, Fred J. Cook, was attacked. When Cook requested time to reply in keeping with the fairness doctrine, the station refused. Upon appeal to the FCC, the Commission declared that there was personal attack and the station had failed to meet its obligation. The station appealed and the case wended its way through the courts and eventually to the Supreme Court. The court ruled for the FCC, giving sanction to the fairness doctrine.

The doctrine, nevertheless, disturbed many journalists, who considered it a violation of First Amendment rights of free speech/free press which should allow reporters to make their own decisions about balancing stories. Fairness, in this view, should not be forced by the FCC. In order to avoid the requirement to go out and find contrasting viewpoints on every issue raised in a story, some journalists simply avoided any coverage of some controversial issues. This "chilling effect" was just the opposite of what the FCC intended.

By the 1980s, many things had changed. The "scarcity" argument which dictated the "public trustee" philosophy of the Commission, was disappearing with the abundant number of channels available on cable TV. Without scarcity, or with many other voices in the marketplace of ideas, there were perhaps fewer compelling reasons to keep the fairness doctrine. This was also the era of deregulation when the FCC took on a different attitude about its many rules, seen as an unnecessary burden by most stations. The new Chairman of the FCC, Mark Fowler, appointed by President Reagan, publicly avowed to kill to fairness doctrine.

By 1985, the FCC issued its Fairness Report, asserting that the doctrine was no longer having its intended effect, might actually have a "chilling effect" and might be in violation of the First Amendment. In a 1987 case, Meredith Corp. v. FCC, the courts declared that the doctrine was not mandated by Congress and the FCC did not have to continue to enforce it. The FCC dissolved the doctrine in August of that year.

However, before the Commission's action, in the spring of 1987, both houses of Congress voted to put the fairness doctrine into law--a statutory fairness doctrine which the FCC would have to enforce, like it or not. But President Reagan, in keeping with his deregulatory efforts and his long-standing favor of keeping government out of the affairs of business, vetoed the legislation. There were insufficient votes to override the veto. Congressional efforts to make the doctrine into law surfaced again during the Bush administration. As before, the legislation was vetoed, this time by Bush.

The fairness doctrine remains just beneath the surface of concerns over broadcasting and cablecasting, and some members of congress continue to threaten to pass it into legislation. Currently, however, there is no required balance of controversial issues as mandated by the fairness doctrine. The public relies instead on the judgment of broadcast journalists and its own reasoning ability to sort out one-sided or distorted coverage of an issue. Indeed, experience over the past several years since the demise of the doctrine shows that broadcasters can and do provide substantial coverage of controversial issues of public importance in their communities, including contrasting viewpoints, through news, public affairs, public service, interactive and special programming.

-Val E. Limburg

See also Deregulation; Federal Communications Commission; Political Processes and Television


http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/F/htmlF/fairnessdoct/fairnessdoct.htm
 

 

 

 

And I was watching PBS and ABC and NIghtline. There was NOTHING from the Dems...
It was not that long ago that they either HAD TO give both sides, or did so out of courtesy. But that seldom is seen now....

There are better ways to bring balance to broadcasting.

* Ownership restrictions

* Replace PBS: Use the BBC model instead

* Enforce minimum public service requirements.

"Indeed, experience over the past several years since the demise of the doctrine shows that broadcasters can and do provide substantial coverage of controversial issues of public importance in their communities, including contrasting viewpoints, through news, public affairs, public service, interactive and special programming."


My experience has been that the only way to find contrasting viewpoints is to search for them on the internet. My cable service does not provide them.

..and not a part of the public 'airwaves.'

My comment was intended to include all news services. ABC CBS NBC CNN and for that matter CSPAN.

This was posted by ParanoidPat a couple of weeks ago to a disinterested audience. But I think that is shows that not only is the press not free it is tainted.





CONCEPT PAPER



Working Group on Preventive and Preemptive Military Intervention


William W. Keller and Gordon R. Mitchell1
Project Coordinators

<Snip>

U.S. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), the ranking Democrat on the Senate
Intelligence Committee, called for an FBI investigation into the forgery of documents cited by President Bush and Secretary Powell as proof of Iraq’s nuclear transactions with Niger. As Rockefeller explained in a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller: “There is a
possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq.”26

The timeliness of Rockefeller’s proposed inquiry was underscored by the
appearance of official documents that lay out official American deception plans: "In a document last autumn, the joint chiefs of staff stressed the need for strategic deception and influence operations as tools of war. The army, navy and air force have been directed to devise plans for information warfare."27 According to defense analyst William Arkin, the Bush strategy lays out goals for information warfare that pursue D5E: "destruction, degradation, denial, disruption, deceit, and exploitation." Arkin notes that the wide array of sites and ractices of information control brought into the range of this policy "blurs or even erases the boundaries between factual information and news, on the one hand, and public relations, propaganda and psychological warfare on the other."28

This fusion of military deception programs with media propaganda efforts enabled the Office of Strategic Influence to commission officers from the U.S. Army's Psychological Operations Command to work as interns in the news division of CNN.29

on edit link

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=1308711

...was all about. It's too bad that some celebrate its demise because it was one of the only remaining standards for fairness and equal access to the American media.

- The end of the FD brought the beginning of political hitmen like Limbaugh and the end of civil public debate.

contributed to the demise of the Fairness Doctrine.

Someone pointed it out to me a few years ago, but I can't for the life of me remember who the Congressman was..

F.D. was about reducing every controversial issue to black-and-white, point/counterpoint. It encouraged media to look away completely from certain issues. And instead of Rush Limbaughs on the radio, we had Archie Bunker-wannabe's in every newsroom editorializing to us.

I believe you are confusing the effects of media monopolism and conflicts of interest with the absense of F.D.

We should work for a media market with a structure that encourages fairness. I believe the way to do this is to license televisions at a flat rate, creating a well-endowed public broadcaster that has to balance between impartiality and populism. Then private broadcasters can drop the pretenses and present their coverage as partisan if they wish (and if they won't admit to reporting from a particular POV, they will eventually come to be ridiculed or resented by the others for their pretensiousness).

http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/F/htmlF/fairnessdoct/fairnessdoct.htm

The policy of the United States Federal Communications Commission that became known as the "Fairness Doctrine" is an attempt to ensure that all coverage of controversial issues by a broadcast station be balanced and fair. The FCC took the view, in 1949, that station licensees were "public trustees," and as such had an obligation to afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of contrasting points of view on controversial issues of public importance. The Commission later held that stations were also obligated to actively seek out issues of importance to their community and air programming that addressed those issues. With the deregulation sweep of the Reagan Administration during the 1980s, the Commission dissolved the fairness doctrine.

This doctrine grew out of concern that because of the large number of applications for radio station being submitted and the limited number of frequencies available, broadcasters should make sure they did not use their stations simply as advocates with a singular perspective. Rather, they must allow all points of view. That requirement was to be enforced by FCC mandate.

From the early 1940s, the FCC had established the "Mayflower Doctrine," which prohibited editorializing by stations. But that absolute ban softened somewhat by the end of the decade, allowing editorializing only if other points of view were aired, balancing that of the station's. During these years, the FCC had established dicta and case law guiding the operation of the doctrine.

In ensuing years the FCC ensured that the doctrine was operational by laying out rules defining such matters as personal attack and political editorializing (1967). In 1971 the Commission set requirements for the stations to report, with their license renewal, efforts to seek out and address issues of concern to the community. This process became known as "Ascertainment of Community Needs," and was to be done systematically and by the station management.

The fairness doctrine ran parallel to Section 315 of the Communications Act of 1937 which required stations to offer "equal opportunity" to all legally qualified political candidates for any office if they had allowed any person running in that office to use the station. The attempt was to balance--to force an even handedness. Section 315 exempted news programs, interviews and documentaries. But the doctrine would include such efforts. Another major difference should be noted here: Section 315 was federal law, passed by Congress. The fairness doctrine was simply FCC policy.


here's a DU article about FD:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/04/01/29_fairness.html

Fairness Doctrine, or Fair and Balanced?
January 29, 2004
By Broadcast Democrat

Bill O'Reilly recently launched into an editorial tirade on the O'Reilly Factor regarding the "rights of Christians to remove any religion from schools that they find offensive." He was responding to the ACLU's challenges to remove school prayer and/or the pledge of allegiance. It was not in a book, on a website, or anywhere but right on the TV, and in the middle of what passes for news programming. Had you tuned into it, you might have mistaken it for real news. How is it that we find ourselves in a situation where a media outlet as large as Fox News can be so one-sided?

Surely we have noticed the neo-conservative forces hard at work in our modern media. As a long time member of the media I have seen many things come to pass, and many times I have helped decide which stories are and are not told to you. Every day I tried to make choices that best reflected the stories I was given to tell my local community. Not only is this generally understood as "proper journalism" it was also a bastion of media ethics and principles for the majority of the existence of the FCC until the Reagan Administration. I'm probably part of a dying breed, and it may be only a matter of time before this concept is gone from broadcasting entirely.

The conceptual framework of media equity had been enshrined in the Fairness Doctrine, an ethical principle of broadcasting which was intended to provide accurate coverage of controversial issues. Under the ideology of the "public trusteeship" of broadcasters, an obligation of this status was to adhere to this doctrine. The doctrine was brought forth with the goal of preventing stations and/or broadcasters from becoming the tools of a singular point of view.

Another measure taken by the FCC to prevent this "mouthpiece effect" was the Mayflower Doctrine. This was meant to prevent editorializing by the station, and was later relaxed to allow a point-counterpoint approach. It preserved the balance between freedom of speech, ethical journalism and "headline-hunger." Some old school journalists and members of the media still try to adhere to these ideals, regardless of personal feelings and/or political affiliations. This is why we in the media have such respect for names like John Chancellor (NBC), Walter Kronkite (CBS), or Hugh Downing (ABC). These were people who generally gave you the straight story without any spin. At least, that's how we felt in the media when the Fairness Doctrine was alive and well. Of course they'll have their own opinions; they aren't robots. But they kept it to themselves. Think about it; how many people do we look up to with the same reverence or respect in our nightly news selections? Today, many of them are interchangeable puppets.

In 1969, the Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC (395 U.S. 367) court case tested the constitutionality of the Doctrine and found it to be "limiting of public debate" and set in motion the forces which eventually stripped it from broadcasting canon in 1987.

However, this ruling was flawed. Based on the scarcity principle of the broadcast spectrum (ie. the channels on the dial), it did not consider the explosion of cable, Internet, and digital radio services (like XM satellite radio). There isn't a scarcity of media when 200 TV, 200 Radio channels, and endless amounts of web pages await a visitor, especially when many are neo-conservative in nature. (Please note: Republican as it is traditionally defined is not a bad word to me. Unfortunately, it has been overrun by social politics.)

Freed from the burden of having to air alternate or contemporary viewpoints, the right-wing has seized on the opportunity to broadcast and propagate itself. According to Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting (CIPB), "Research demonstrates that news and public affairs substantially declined after termination of the Fairness Doctrine, contrary to broadcaster promises. What did increase were right-wing talk shows and religious right ministries, now free to editorialize against their favorite demons without fear of contradiction."

So naturally they would be opposed to the idea of the fairness doctrine coming back into play. As a result, big media gets bigger and bigger without the fairness doctrine, all becoming the mouthpiece of the Neo-Conservatives. Consider this in tandem with the recent restructuring of ownership rules by the FCC to allow more stations to be owned by one owner, and a dangerous trend towards media fascism is dangerously close.

Imagine a world where 35% of the national audience as a maximum is held by one owner, so maybe three major national owners who all contribute to the Republican party? We know CBS and FOX do it, so that's two out of three. Frightening. In this world, Fox News would be the least of our worries. And by paying for it by purchasing cable service or even the goods of their advertisers, it would get even worse. Thankfully Congress, mainly the straight-thinking members, realized that super-consolidation of the media is bad. However, it could easily come up again. With the FCC as an independent regulatory agency controlled by Republicans (Michael Powell, FCC Chairman, is Colin Powell's son after all), it could quietly come up and become mandate again. Think Clear Channel with a vengeance.

I can't be the only one who has witnessed firsthand the motions of the right-wing media juggernaut as of late. As a long time member of the broadcast world, I have seen the media many come to depend on for news and information change in many ways. However, I feel that a media that is more interested in the top headlines of scandal and moneymaking has wholeheartedly abused these trusts. Granted, at the end of the day, broadcasting is a business meant to make money. However, it is worth noting how regulations and laws have been gutted since the Reagan Administration. It is very easy to see motion towards a near-fascist representation of our world.

As a broadcast veteran, and as a moderate Democrat, I urge you to support the return of the Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting. Not only would it better the media to be open to alternative and contemporary viewpoints, it would also bring our media world closer to that of what the makers of it (Sarnoff, Armstrong, DeForest, Marconi) had intended it to be; a media used for the betterment of public safety and public good. Instead it has become a perverted, money making scheme that is about the special interests of the money holders. Fairness be damned.



The FCC fairness policy was given great credence by the 1969 U.S. Supreme Court case of Red Lion Broadcasting Co., Inc. v. FCC. In that case, a station in Pennsylvania, licensed by Red Lion Co., had aired a "Christian Crusade" program wherein an author, Fred J. Cook, was attacked. When Cook requested time to reply in keeping with the fairness doctrine, the station refused. Upon appeal to the FCC, the Commission declared that there was personal attack and the station had failed to meet its obligation. The station appealed and the case wended its way through the courts and eventually to the Supreme Court. The court ruled for the FCC, giving sanction to the fairness doctrine.

The doctrine, nevertheless, disturbed many journalists, who considered it a violation of First Amendment rights of free speech/free press which should allow reporters to make their own decisions about balancing stories. Fairness, in this view, should not be forced by the FCC. In order to avoid the requirement to go out and find contrasting viewpoints on every issue raised in a story, some journalists simply avoided any coverage of some controversial issues. This "chilling effect" was just the opposite of what the FCC intended.

By the 1980s, many things had changed. The "scarcity" argument which dictated the "public trustee" philosophy of the Commission, was disappearing with the abundant number of channels available on cable TV. Without scarcity, or with many other voices in the marketplace of ideas, there were perhaps fewer compelling reasons to keep the fairness doctrine. This was also the era of deregulation when the FCC took on a different attitude about its many rules, seen as an unnecessary burden by most stations. The new Chairman of the FCC, Mark Fowler, appointed by President Reagan, publicly avowed to kill to fairness doctrine.

By 1985, the FCC issued its Fairness Report, asserting that the doctrine was no longer having its intended effect, might actually have a "chilling effect" and might be in violation of the First Amendment. In a 1987 case, Meredith Corp. v. FCC, the courts declared that the doctrine was not mandated by Congress and the FCC did not have to continue to enforce it. The FCC dissolved the doctrine in August of that year.

But F.D. failed.

It existed to try and and make a structurally-lopsided system upstanding.

In the end, it couldn't even foster the necessary information culture to protect the notion of fairness and public service (it couldn't protect itself).

karma?

a more liberal or at least a station without rightward leaning doctrination can make money, then we've got a chance without FD.

What do you think this for-profit broadcaster will eventually come to advocate as a solution to all other problems? For-profit, private business.

We've been there already with CNN.

That's what is so broken about the American Left: It's not Left.