2 Responses to Trump – Lesser of Two Evils And A Patriot

  1. You misunderstand the history and use of the Fairness Doctrine. When it was being employed (it was never required by law, but was a practice guideline promoted by the FCC), it meant opposing views should be significantly represented ON THE SAME CHANNEL. We obviously don’t do that now with so many more channels available. Each channel today, especially the 24-hour news outlets, “narrowcasts” toward specific target audience profiles. The FCC eliminated the Doctrine in 1987, and in August 2011 the FCC formally removed the language that implemented the Doctrine.

    (Credit for the info goes to my wife, retired CBS news writer, 40 years, five Emmys.)

  2. Thank you for the great input. You are correct. The Fairness Doctrine, from an official position, became history in 2011. But does that really define permanency? Frankly, I do not believe it has disappeared completely. I strongly suspect it remains simmering on the back burner for Democrats, solely due to the ongoing success of conservative talk radio & Fox News. Many on the left blame those sources of daily comment for a number of criminal and terrorist acts carried out by deranged individuals with, to the best of my knowledge, no proven guidance from or link to right wing media commentary. If given the opportunity, I think it a safe bet to suggest that a reintroduction of the Fairness Doctrine, in an effort to at least blunt or better, eliminate conservative opinion, sway and momentum, would quickly move it to the front burner. It seems only reasonable to suggest that the requirement would be an hour’s worth of equal time, as you pointed out, per station/channel. However, it would not be merely a guidline as in times past. Rather, it would be a full on FCC regulation meaning every broadcast license would depend upon compliance.

    Congratulations to your wife. Forty years of stellar performance. The proof is in the Emmys. Nicely done.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s