Ten Years Ago... Fairness and the Airwaves

FAIRNESS AND THE AIRWAVES
[SOURCE: Washington Post 3/19/1997, AUTHOR: Richard Harwood]
[Commentary] "Will the great multimedia corporations that now dominate broadcasting demonstrate to a skeptical Supreme Court and a skeptical public their ability to use the public's airwaves in a responsible and ethical manner?" asked Harwood in his column. In the case of broadcasting, the Supreme Court historically has rejected that the view that private enterprise and the free market system are best for protecting public debate. Broadcast regulation, the legal scholar Lee Bollinger has written, was "built on two phenomena: a fear of the power of television and radio to control the content of public discussion and a concomitant belief in the inability of the market to control that power." The broad thrust of those terms in the early days was that radio and television station owners must serve in their programming the "public interest, convenience or necessity." In fleshing out that generality, the FCC decreed that broadcasters should not put on the air "indecent" or "obscene" material, that they must abide by a "Fairness Doctrine" requiring them to present issues of public concern in a fair and disinterested manner, and that if they give time to one candidate for public office they must give equal time to any competitors for that office. All that is changing, Harwood wrote, not because of any mandate from the Supreme Court, which still condones government regulation, but because of successful pressures on the FCC to change its rules. The Commission has adapted itself to new definitions of obscenity and indecency to the point where anything goes -- almost. The Fairness Doctrine was abandoned in 1987 with the enthusiastic support of President Reagan, who vetoed congressional efforts to keep it in place.
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