Post #37.
Well…a minute with Google and…
Seeing a trend?
A trend of three articles about a news source not affected by the Fairness Doctrine.
Generally, the FCC already disallows outright falsehoods. See these factsheets:
http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/journalism.html
http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/falsebroadcast.html
but if you go much beyond that in terms of regulation, you’re running into a first amendment thing.
Are there examples of these regulations being enforced?
I am not sure how easy it is to demonstrate a chilling effect. Doubly so in Canada, which has a much stronger public broadcasting system in the first place.
The press hasn’t taken the Birthers seriously in years, and most media outlets never took them seriously. The truth about that story has been out there for a very long time. The reason their numbers have increased is not because there’s a lack of equitable, balanced, and honest coverage: the coverage is honest but not balanced or equitable because their views have been proved to be false. (Which means the doctrine might present a problem.) Their poll numbers are up because their activities were covered so extensively, and because of pure partisanship. It’s pretty much the same with the death panels story, with the added complication that the Democrats failed to answer the bell until the story turned into a big problem for them.
Because I don’t trust a panel of five political hacks to be impartial arbiters of who is lying and who is providing fair news coverage. The fact that you’re willing to expand this beyond individual reports and into things like “patterns of dishonesty” does not help.
That’s pretty much what the First Amendment is about. It’s not 1987. There are more media outlets than ever, which is likely to make your plan either useless or an enormous expansion of the FCC (into cable, satellite and online media) that nobody is likely to support.
I also mentioned Canada’s law against lying. If the Fairness Doctrine does not cover this I would explicitly want a rule against lying added to it. Its what I have been on about for most of this thread.
As to a trend do you really want me to get a laundry list of FOX lies and post them here? There are abundant sources for this all over the place. Want it all copied and pasted here?
No, I want you to find me legal support for the concept that the Federal Government is permitted to regulate the content of cable channels in this fashion. And Canadian law, oddly enough, isn’t controlling.
I see a trend of you ignoring my question. No one here is denying Fox News is biased.
Please answer: exactly how do you propose enforcing the Fairness Doctrine?
The fairness doctrine had nothing to do with the reporting of news. It is aimed at radio broadcast only and that is because the Democratic Party wants to silence Rush Limbaugh for his opinion. He is an entertainer and not a news organization.
And you seem to confuse discussion of something like government health care limits (IE death panels) as a Fox network generated lie. If it bothers you that a news group reports on the financial limitations of a government financed health care system that is not a lie.
We know Fox News (not the same as Fox) is full of crap. Do you think an FCC lead by Michael Powell and two of his closest cronies would have suspended their license or fined them?
Then why didn’t they try to bring it back when they controlled both houses of Congress and the White House? No legislation on the doctrine has been introduced since 2005, and most prominent Democrats indicated they didn’t want to touch the issue.
This is an excellent post, particularly the final paragraph.
They were too busy fighting The War On Christmas.
You realize that most media companies are owned by one of six companies don’t you?
* AOL Time Warner
* Disney
* General Electric
* News Corporation
* Viacom
* Vivendi UniversalI don’t see a problem, as long as half of these corporations lean to the left. Which ones would those be?
sigh
I’ll repeat…
The Fairness Doctrine is not the Equal Time rule.
They are different things.
I don’t think it’s often enforced, because the standard is pretty high. I see one case of something being endorsed in 1991, where radio station KSHE was fined $25,000 after one of their on air hosts played the Emergency Broadcast System siren and a fake civil defense notice that the country was under nuclear attack (although I think the $25,000 fine was specifically for false use of the EBS siren, and then in the same year, WALE being formally warned after they reported, as a hoax, that their overnight guy had been shot in the head and killed.
Yes, I realize that extremely well publicized and elementary point. I also realize it doesn’t respond to what I said: the FCC doesn’t regulate satellite TV, blogs, podcasts, Twitter and Facebook. (You might remember that a politician started the whole death panel thing on a social networking site.) Unless you want it to do that, there are a ton of media outlets that will not be affected at all by your new Fairness Doctrine. Fewer people watch the broadcast networks than ever. That includes the evening news.
Then I propose a rule/law that covers news media that ends up on a TV whether it get there via cable or satellite or broadcast.
Again, Canada apparently does it without much trouble and they seem a pretty free people to me.