Media Rants: Health Care, Dumbassification, and the Fairness Doctrine

Health Care, Dumbassification, and the Fairness Doctrine

Media Rants

By Tony Palmeri

From the May 2010 edition of The SCENE

Did you catch any of the broadcast “debate” over the “historic” health care “reform” legislation? On television and talk radio, health care news and commentary sounded so detached from reality that I half expected to see the “expert” pundits escorted out of broadcast studios in straitjackets.

Being a corporate media expert or talk show host these days requires being or acting delusional. For health care discourse, this means Democrat-leaning flaks must refer to Obamacare as akin to Social Security and Medicare. Republican flaks, meanwhile, find “socialism” in everything Obama.

Rather than expose delusional talking points as fraudulent, corporate media uncritically present partisan propaganda as “mainstream” thinking. Fact: Obamacare is neither socialist nor even FDR or LBJ lite. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich is spot on: "Don't believe anyone who says Obama's healthcare legislation marks a swing of the pendulum back toward the Great Society and the New Deal. Obama's health bill is a very conservative piece of legislation, building on a Republican (a private market approach) rather than a New Deal foundation. The New Deal foundation would have offered Medicare to all Americans or, at the very least, featured a public insurance option."

Obamacare is a Mitt Romneyish, Wall St. friendly health care scheme that will coerce 30 million people into purchasing a defective private insurance company product. The private insurance industry becomes another “too big to fail” operation. In the topsy-turvy world of modern partisan politics, Democrats call this a great progressive achievement while the GOP condemns it as socialist. Such absurdities are part and parcel of what hip-hop icon Chuck D calls the “dumbassification” of American popular culture.

Too bad Dr. Obama’s health care plan doesn’t treat our ailing, dumbassified discourse. Perhaps a revival of the Fairness Doctrine is the necessary medicine.

The Communications Act of 1934 created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The 1934 Act and 1996 update empower the FCC to revoke the licenses of broadcasters not operating in the “public interest.” License revocation is extremely rare, and almost never the result of incompetent or incomplete news programming. (Threats to revoke licenses are usually the result of broadcasts defined by the FCC as “obscene, indecent, or profane.”).

In 1949 the FCC adopted the “Fairness Doctrine” as a formal rule to promote balanced coverage of controversial issues. The Congress in 1959 amended the 1934 Act to endorse the Fairness Doctrine: “A broadcast licensee shall afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of conflicting views on matters of public importance.”

In a landmark 1969 decision (Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC), the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of the Fairness Doctrine. Justice Byron White argued that, “A license permits broadcasting, but the licensee has no constitutional right to be the one who holds the license or to monopolize a . . . frequency to the exclusion of his fellow citizens. There is nothing in the First Amendment which prevents the Government from requiring a licensee to share his frequency with others . . . It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.”

The FCC never enforced the Fairness Doctrine in a heavy handed manner; Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting essayist Steve Rendall writes that “Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows or editorials . . . The Fairness Doctrine simply prohibited stations from broadcasting from a single perspective, day after day, without presenting opposing views.” Yet Ronald Reagan’s deregulation friendly 1980s FCC revoked the Doctrine, aided by a US Court of Appeals ruling (written by Justice Robert Bork and concurred with by soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia) that Congress’ 1959 amendment did not obligate the FCC to enforce it.

Fairness Doctrine opponents argue that cable television, the Internet, and satellite radio make it irrelevant. That is, anyone upset by one-sided coverage or commentary only need to find alternative views somewhere else. Sounds plausible, except for the fact that most citizens do not “opinion shop” for balanced views, nor should they have to purchase cable, Internet, or satellite services because the media they do have access to selfishly broadcasts a narrow spectrum of reporting and commentary.

Republicans and conservatives tend to be virulently opposed to the Fairness Doctrine, yet ironically they suffer the most from its absence. Conservatives could have established that Obama and the Democrats were pushing a Republican health care bill, while the GOP could have negotiated stronger market reforms. Instead, following the lead of the one-sided echo chamber that is right wing talk radio, they were reduced to renouncing “death panels,” “socialism,” and other absurdities. Said former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum,“We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.”

Delusional Democrat and Republican leaders needn’t worry about the Fairness Doctrine coming back. President Obama’s FCC Chair Julius Genachowski says “I don’t think the FCC should be involved in censorship of content based on political speech or opinion.” Requiring more voices and balance is “censorship of content?” I suppose it shouldn’t surprise anyone that dumbassification exists at the highest levels of the federal government.