New FCC: Don't Play "Fairness"

Ask a radio or TV station general manager who once dealt with the Fairness Doctrine, and you'll hear very little good about it. The title sounds noble, but it's content regulation and far from constitutional. That's why the FCC canned it in the 1980's.

Some Democrats have thought about reviving it to get back at right-wing talk show hosts. Fortunately, new FCC commissioner Robert McDowell is not about to help them with their revenge fantasies.

And, he warns, passing a new Fairness Doctrine could end up deregulating broadcasting even further, according to Multichannel News:

"Actually, in a string of media cases stretching back over more than 20 years, various judges on the D.C. Circuit - both Democratic and Republican appointees - have suggested that it is time for the Supreme Court to rethink the concept of spectrum scarcity as a justification for limiting broadcasters' First Amendment rights. A revived Doctrine would provide a big, bright bulls-eye for those who wish to make that happen. That development would have implications far beyond the Doctrine itself. Much of our content regulation of broadcasters - including most of the FCC's existing localism rules and the regulations requiring three hours a week of children's programming - rest on the spectrum scarcity rationale. If that rationale is invalidated, serious legal challenges to all those other content rules may follow."

In other words, many regulations we have now are based on an outdated concept: that we only have so many available TV channels. That's not the case anymore with the Internet and cable. McDowell says if we throw up an unconstitutional regulation, we lose others as broadcasters challenge them.

I'm surprised commercial over-the-air broadcasters haven't already challenged the FCC's rule requiring them to air three hours a week of educational programming. Apparently the FCC didn't believe in PBS, Nickelodeon, Discovery, or Noggin when they made that rule. In Arizona, during football season, it means a messed-up Saturday schedule where kids programming ends up in some weird places -- like just before the early news -- because there's nowhere else to put it. "Animal Adventures" isn't a bad lead-in, but I'd prefer Russ Mitchell at the CBS News desk.

Broadcasters have gone along with this rule and others to be good citizens, but it's time they stopped. Cable stations don't have to live under FCC rules, even though they're right next to the broadcast stations on the dial. How's this for a Fairness Doctrine: it is simply ridiculous for our nation's television companies to be operating under two sets of regulations, especially when many of them are outdated and unconstitutional. Kudos to our new FCC head for having a few grains of sense about this. Let's hope he harvests some more.