Ratings do not compel asnyone to do a blessed thing – if someone so chooses, they can continue to program Glenn Beck to, say, Key West or Berkeley. We are talking about accountability to the public by licensees of the public arirwaves they are the ultimate owners of.
N.B.: Chavez refused to renew the broadcast license of RCTV after (five years after) RCTV publicly supported the attempted coup d’etat of 2002. They’re still broadcasting on cable. They got off light. If a radio station in the U.S. supported a failed attempt to overthrow the government, every executive in it would be doing time for treason.
I think the objection is first, to his calling it a “democratic revolution”, and secondly, in bringing up that we assisted his attempted ouster. The statements taken together imply both that Chavez’s coming to power was a good thing, and also that the US Government was wrong to try to get him out of power, and a lot of conservatives would disagree with both those assertions.
And as to your “real freeper issue with Mark Llloyd”, I really don’t think the issue with Mark Lloyd is that he’s black. A lot of people are black. A lot of FCC employees are black. And that’s frankly pretty insulting. It’s more that he’s been a critic for 10 years of the FCC deregulation policies the Republicans put in in the 80s, and now he’s in a position where he can reverse a lot of those policies. If you think the deregulation was a good thing, then you’re going to have a problem with Mark Lloyd.
Both those things are true.
Where do you get this?
Or this? (We WERE wrong, but Lloyd doesn’t SAY that.)
It did, but it probably would be overturned today, and I think that if it hadn’t been repealed or if Reagan hadn’t vetoed the 1987 Fairness Doctrine bill, the court probably would have overturned it.
On what grounds would it be overturned? Where in the US Constitution do you find a right for broadcasters to use public airwaves for free? Where do you find a right for corporations to monopolize them for only one kind of (highly self-serving) political speech?
Whose speech was being abridged by the Fairness Doctrine?
On the grounds that 6 of 9 justices now sitting were appointed by Republicans?
Forty year old Supreme Court precedent on Fairness Doctrine notwithstanding (both free speech jurisprudence and conditional privilege jurisprudence has come a long way since then), I think that assessment of licensing fees based on content of radio broadcasts raises some free speech concerns.
It is true that broadcasters are being given the privilege to use the public airwaves, and that such privileges can generally be conditioned by the government. But in the free speech context, even conditions on privileges generally need to be content neutral. You can imagine a scenario in which the government only lets Republicans drive on federal interstate, or in which only corporations who donate to Democrats are allowed to advertise on public buses or live in public housing. Clearly, the power to condition licensing and access to public privileges is not unlimited.
So what limits might there be? As above, the government clearly cannot facially discriminate on the basis of political opinion when granting access to government privileges. It follows, probably, that it cannot do so by discriminatory impact either, if the purpose is the same. For example, if the government knew that female-owned radio stations were more likely to broadcast Democratic opinions, it could not favor female-owned radio stations for that purpose.
This question obviously falls into something of a gray area in which there might be discriminatory effects which may or may not be the intended purpose of the policy. Tilting the scales to create more diverse ownership of broadcasting may be a legitimate end on its own, even if it has a politically discriminatory impact. But when the person doing it references studies showing that this demographic diversity leads to an ideological balance he prefers, that’s not a good sign.
Labeling the regulation of licensing as local control doesn’t really change the analysis, it just makes it one step removed. The question would then become on what basis the local regulators decide who gets licenses and at what cost. If that basis is something like political balance, I think there is a real constitutional problem.
This is not something I would get too worked up over until a specific plan is proposed through rulemaking. But it also isn’t hysterical to be concerned (though I have no doubt that if these accusations had been made on a similar basis about something Bush did, some of the people in this thread would call the accusations hysterical).
Holy Crap! That guy?? He makes Hitler seem like Gandhi!!
Calling it a democratic revolution is implying it’s a good thing. “Democracy” is one of those positive buzz words. Somebody who supports Chavez is going to call his coming to power, “a democratic revolution”, somebody who opposes him, is going to call it, “Chavez’s takeover” or something like that.
Again, supporting democracy=good. Trying to overthrow democracy=bad. Somebody who thinks the coup was a good thing, wouldn’t say “The property owners and the folks who then controlled the media” aided by us, tried to oust him, and so after that, he decided to pay closer attention to the media.
He’s set up a narrative here, where you have two sides…the people, and Chavez, representing them, on the one side, and on the other, “the property owners”, and “the folks who control the media” on the other.
And when you set up a narrative like that, “the people” are always the good guys, and “the property owners” are the bad guys who are oppressing the people. It’s the same reason that in the Robin Hood stories, Robin Hood is the good guy and the Sheriff of Nottingham is the bad guy. And that’s the narrative that people who Chavez have set up.
Now, you could set up another narrative that reverses the whole situation. You could say that what happened is that a demagogue came to power and started transforming Venezuela into a dictatorship, and that people concerned about the country’s move to dictatorship, including the media, with the help of the US, tried to overthrow him, and so, in response, Chavez censored the media.
That tells the same story…Chavez gets elected, there’s a coup attempt the media participates in, it fails, and Chavez puts more control on the media, but it’s an entirely different narrative.
The press in general was being abridged by the Fairness Doctrine, because journalists were shying away from reporting on controversial issues so as to avoid having to worry that the FCC wouldn’t find the coverage of the issue balanced.
It was also being used by the administration against its enemies. Bill Ruder, who was an Assistant Secretary of Commerce during the Johnson during the Johnson administration later confessed:
Later, after Nixon was elected, his staff brought Fairness Doctrine challenges against broadcasters who questioned the war in Vietnam.
So what exactly are these ‘public needs’ that are currently left wanting by current FCC policy? Is it food? Clothing? Shelter? Health Care? Weather? Traffic Reports?
It’s calling it what it was. Chavez came to power through the Democratic process. If you listen to Lloyd, he was clarifying what he meant by "revolution. He said, “In Venezuela, with Chavez, is really an incredible revolution - a democratic revolution. To begin to put in place things that are going to have an impact on the people of Venezuela.”
He started to say revolution, and then clarified that he was not talking about a literal, violent revolution (there wasn’t one. Chavez was elected fair and square), but a figurative revolution in sense of what was called the “Republican Revolution” in 1994 led by Newt Gingrich.
What’s not accurate about Lloyd’s words?
You disagree?
Why wouldn’t they? It’s objectively what happened.
What part of that is not factually accurate?
Lloyd didn’t put any spin on it at all. He just described what objectively happened.
Incidentally, you don’t actually think we were RIGHT to support the coup, do you?
Cite?
The phrase is “public interest,” not “public needs.”
What’s in the public interest is for the public to decide, not Clear Channel.
Indeed you could – but not with as much honesty, or even plausibility.
There are so many different media in so many different hands that it was deemed no longer necessary.
A big oops if you ask me, but that was the gist of the argument.
No one’s, of course.
This articleby Thomas Hazlett and David Sosa from the January 1997 Journal of Legal Studies (warning, in PDF) suggests that the chilling effect was real.
Also check the The General Fairness Doctrine Obligations of Broadcast Licensees (102 F.C.C.2d 145) (“The Fairness Report”), which I can’t find online, which was the FCC decision repealing the doctrine, and found that it no longer served the public interest and was likely unconstitutional.
Mark Lloyd used the word ‘needs’, but fine, what public interests aren’t currently being served?
And why aren’t ratings a good measure of what the public would like for content mix?
That’s for the public to decide.
Ratings only represent a small sampling of the public as a whole, plus it’s a stupid measure of public interest anyway. Hardcore porn on network TV would draw large ratings, but that doesn’t mean it would serve the public interest or represent public desires.