Bring back the fairness doctrine and equal time
Published: 1/26/2021 2:29:27 PM
Bring back the fairness doctrine
I served a four-year hitch in the Navy as a Radioman during the Vietnam conflict. During that time, I earned my First Class Radiotelephone License from the FCC and briefly considered a career in broadcast engineering before turning to other pursuits (I still occasionally dream in Morse Code).
The training for my license included mastery of federal communications law. Among other rules back then, radio and TV outlets were required under the agency’s “Fairness Doctrine” to offer equal time to differing sides on political issues. In 1987, this rule was repealed. The result was a deluge of stations that spawned the talk jocks of today ensconced in their media echo chambers: closed systems where constant repetition of distortions insulated against rebuttal has shaped public opinion to the point where different definitions of reality are able to spread easily.