fairness doctrine Archive

The folks at ceasespin.org are angry, and they have good reason to be. The media lie and even when you catch them at it, the government seems powerless to stop them.  They’ve got a plan to change things, but like so many plans that arise from anger, they haven’t thought things through. Much of their outrage is tied to the reversal on appeal of a wrongful termination verdict in 2003 stemming from a case in which reporters for WTVT, Tampa, refused to air the statements of Monsanto employees that they personally knew to be false.

This is a sad commentary on the nature of the media, but its also a case where hard cases make good law, and the ceasespin.org site should be a great resource for journalism schools everywhere, because in just a few web pages, the site illustrates the conundrum of how objectivity can be achieved and who decides what is fair.  For instance, they’ve not yet been able to come up with a standard:

Note: this prototype is for informational and educational purposes only. It demonstrates what quality criteria might be used in an actual news quality rating system and how that translates into a quality rating score. The actual news quality standard is still in development and will be published on this and other websites further into the development cycle.

This is not surprise to any third or fourth year journalism undergraduate who has considered the difficulty of who decides. There is a clear danger in any system that places the government in control of media content, and while there are today few first amendment questions for licensed broadcast media (NBC v. United States 1943 pretty much decided that), government regulations must be reasonable and necessary.

So, after a lot of hue and cry, ceasespin winds up posting a self-policing system that is essentially what should be taking place in any good newsroom and has been taught in j-schools at least since the 1930s. Other suggestions like the fairness doctrine and media deconsolidation are much better solutions, but they’re hardly the province of ceasespin. In fact, the fairness doctrine probably is not necessary if there’s diversity of ownership, which was the original concept behind getting rid of it.

In fact, if ceasespin were to apply the standard it wants to see in others to its own coverage of the Fox news decision, it would have to check “no” to at least 6 of its criteria, and probably more. There are reasons that the FCC policies are not laws, but those aren’t cited in the ceasespin story, because it would undercut its own movement. So its own score on its own test: FAIL.

Dear Rush Limbaugh:

Thank you for writing your open letter to President Obama, published Friday as an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. I know things have been tough for your syndicator and owned stations (Premiere/Clear Channel). First, the banks tried to renege on their deal to take your employer private, and you all had to take less. Then the bean-counters came in and you had that mass firing Inauguration day.  Then, the junk bonds keeping your company alive got even junkier.  Standard and Poor downgraded them from B to B-.

With so many things wrong in this country, it made no sense when there was suddenly so much hue and cry from the biggest right wing talk networks and station groups over the fairness doctrine. Mr. Obama’s never liked the fairness doctrine, your party is against it, and you can count those in my party who want it reinstated on your fingers and toes. You may not even need your toes.

Last Friday (the same day Clear Channel’s massive debt got downgraded), you dropped your pants in your WSJ op-ed and it suddenly all made sense. Its not about the fairness doctrine at all, is it?

Its about a handful of companies owning the vast majority of powerful radio stations across this country and putting on nearly every station the same imported schlock with no local staffs, minimal local content, and in some cases not even a living soul stationed at studio or transmitter.

Your precise question to President Obama:

Is it your intention to censor talk radio through a variety of contrivances, such as “local content,” “diversity of ownership,” and “public interest” rules — all of which are designed to appeal to populist sentiments but, as you know, are the death knell of talk radio and the AM band?

Requiring Clear Channel to provide local content in their communities of license is not censorship. Its like requiring an investment company to actually buy some stocks and bonds for their investors and truthfully advise those investors about their holdings. Requiring radio stations to serve their communities–regardless of the political leanings of the ultimate content–is only a death knell to weak and poorly managed companies: companies like yours; companies that you would ordinarily, as a free market conservative, demand be thrown under the bus.

Fact is, Mr. Limbaugh, what has happened in the radio business is the same thing that has happened in the banking, the mortgage, and even the automobile industries. We “let the market decide,” by deregulating everything in sight, and the charlatans took over: people who don’t give a rat’s ass about ethics or values or anything but this month’s profit. Your masters bought up every radio station and station group they could find using expensive debt. The interest payments siphoned off the money for local programming and public service.

The decimation of the radio business by firing legions of talented people at the local stations, replacing them with automatons voiced in sweatshops in “cluster facilities” hundreds of miles away is broadcasting’s version of a Ponzi scheme. Its like selling off the locomotive of a train claiming inertia would keep it moving. Now that its ground to a stop, you’re trying to blame President Obama because you’re afraid he’s going to force you to replace the engine.

Your answer is to do what Rove, Cheney, and Bush did to sell the Iraq war. First you teach that the fairness doctrine is a bad thing. You call it censorship. Then you use those terms in a sentence with all the things you want to sully. Fairness doctrine, public interest, diversity of ownership, local content. There’s no connection, but you hope your listeners aren’t sharp enough to catch it. Saddam Hussein, terrorist, 9/11, weapons of mass destruction, Iraq, axis of evil, mushroom cloud.

But this time, they might catch on. All those words strung together to get us into war were either bad or unfamiliar and foreign sounding. Local content, local ownership, local people behind local mikes discussing local issues—what we once called full-service radio—are things people understand and many of us even remember. It will not be easy to redefine them as a negative when a lot of people will see them as an old friend, and it would truly be karma to see the “populist sentiment” that you’ve played like a violin for 20 years be the thing that puts your stations back in the hands of people who care about serving their communities, and takes you off the air for good.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if your denouement came the very first time you got caught red-handed at the Shock Doctrine? Rush Limbaugh, Saddam Hussein, Sean Hannity, Clear Channel, Terrorist, 9/11, mushroom cloud.

Right wing radio and the conservative blogosphere has been nearly apoplectic since the majority/minority flip in Washington over the possible reapparence of the fairness doctrine. Even an oblique mention by Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) set off right wing blogger Ericka Anderson at Town Hall. Anderson is smart enough not to raise the First Amendment in her argument, but that subject shows up pretty quickly in the comments, no doubt because Sean Hannity’s favorite rant is how he’s going to be imminently unconstitutionally muzzled.

Even Mark P. Mays of Clear Channel fame raised a first amendment issue when he defended Rush Limbaugh’s “Phony Soldiers” gaffe:

While I do not agree with everything Mr. Limbaugh says on every topic, I do believe that he, along with every American, has the right to voice his or her opinion in the manner they choose. The First Amendment gives every American the right to voice his or her opinion, no matter how unpopular. That right is one that I am sure you agree must be cherished and protected.

Fairness Doctrine in full battle array!

At least four Supreme Court decisions since Brinkley v. FRC conclude broadcasting is not covered by the first amendment. Limbaugh has no constitutional right of several hundred thousand watts of force behind his words.

Those who would least like the first amendment to apply to broadcasting are Hannity’s bosses at the Citadel/ABC stations like WABC, and the folks at Clear Channel that air so much of him. For if they truly believe that “Congress shall make no law” restricting freedom of speech, and that freedom applies to radio, then they have a very serious problem in South Florida.

We’re famous for our pirate broadcasters. Right now, there’s a Creole station broadcasting without benefit of government license just a few miles away from where I write this. The problem is so critical that the broadcasters got the state of Florida to pass a law so that local gendarmes could arrest pirate broadcasters and confiscate their equipment. So when the FCC  is too busy with more important things like Bono’s intemperate mouth and Janet Jackson’s pouty breast to enforce those “unconstitutional” laws they now have a Plan B.

If its true that Congress can make no law, then I can build a transmitter so big that it blows the local Clear Channel station all the way to Bermuda, but instead of calling to have me arrested and my transmitter taken away, they can join me in pointing to the first amendment. But of course, they’d be the last folks to do that. Because in fact they really love that Congress has made the laws that empower the Federal Communications Commission. Its what puts them in business and keeps the competition so limited that they can buy most of it.

So why is the right trying something so transparent? Does Hannity really believe the crap he’s spewing or does he think his audience is stupid? I think they see it as a win-win. Since the Obama administration has clearly signaled they don’t want the Fairness Doctrine back, but maybe they might want some more stringent ownership caps, the broadcasters can claim victory over that vicious strawman.

But more Machivellian is the possibility that radio’s future is bleak, and that the folks who have been complaining about how the market should decide what is heard on the radio have actually killed the medium with what they decided to broadcast. Citadel Broadcasting (which bought ABC Radio) is trading at 16 cents a share. Sirius started the day at 8 cents. Like the banks, they overvalued their properties driving out the competition and then watched them crash and burn. But when the folks who can’t see through the Hannity arguments wake up one day and their favorite conservative blowhard is gone from the air, they’ll assume it was the Democrats that got ‘em.

They’re scared. The newspaper crossownership restrictions that the FCC loosened in late 2007 may be an early target of the Obama administration’s desire to help return some diversity to legacy media, and the arguments are already beginning.

Broadcasting and Cable posted their “Open Hopes” yesterday in a pleading editorial that would have made George Orwell proud:

“Diversity can mean helping preserve TV and radio stations by allowing those in smaller markets to combine resources and ensuring that the government does not try to silence its critics.”

That’s got to go down with “less is more” and “obedience is freedom,” as a truly great oxymoron, so let me make this real simple for the obviously confused guardians of our public airwaves. Diversity is more people owning fewer media outlets. That means the local newspaper does not get to buy the local television station.

In the 1930s this was newspapers' biggest fear

In some cases, that is going to result in newspapers going out of business, sometimes the very same newspapers that tried to run radio stations out of business in the 1930s, until United Press threw in the towel and started putting wire services in radio stations.

The Broadcasting and Cable “Open Hopes” editorial tries to finesse its point by talking about “stations in midsized markets” and then changing the subject as quickly as possible to Bush’s embedded reporters and wholesale classification of embarrassing government reports. That’s not the point, in fact its counter-intuitive. If we had more diversity, somebody might actually have called Bush out on those issues at the time!

Broadcasters: you have two choices. Either start providing a range of opinions on your properties so that you can point to diversity on your own outlets, or get ready to be forced to divest them or to face that dreaded “fairness doctrine.” If you had been doing your jobs, there’d be no reason for any of this.

And stop trying to play this off as being somehow driven by troubles at midsized stations in small markets. It was the Chicago Tribune sale that caused FCC Chief Kevin Martin to ram this through, followed by Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of Dow Jones.

And if you’re looking for “synergy” (meaning you get to buy the local television station), think again. The public airwaves are not there to pay for your red ink. If you need a new delivery medium, look to the Internet.