The Fairness Doctrine: A threat to free speech?

last updated 8 January 2015

Save Rush Limbaugh! said Paul Weyrich in The Washington Times. Still flushed with their election night victory, the Democrats are salivating at the prospect of resurrecting the so-called Fairness Doctrine, the old rule requiring media to give equal time to opposing political views. President Reagan killed that rule in 1987, but now House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, and Sen. Chuck Schumer have all publicly called for bringing it back. “When Americans hear both sides of the story,” Durbin says, “they’re in a better position to make a decision.” That may sound reasonable, said A.W.R. Hawkins in Human Events Online, but the immediate effect—and the intention—of a new Fairness Doctrine would be to silence conservative talk-radio hosts. Most stations would give up political broadcasting entirely rather than try to find hours of liberal programming to balance the hugely popular Limbaugh or Sean Hannity. Killing off the one medium that favors conservative thought is the opposite of fairness, but Democrats aren’t about to pass up a chance to neutralize the Right’s most “potent political weapon.”

Talk radio is potent all right, said Joel McNally in the Madison, Wis., Capital Times. But that’s because it’s so one-sided that “it most resembles a government-run media in some totalitarian country.” A study by the Center for American Progress found that no less than 91 percent of weekday talk radio is taken up by conservatives, including far-right wingnuts like Michael Savage who routinely slur blacks and gays and advocate bombing foreign nations. The radio dial can only accommodate a finite number of channels. So in what “bizarre version of democracy” is providing a wide variety of political viewpoints an attempt to “deny free speech”?

Sorry to disappoint both liberals and conservatives, said James Rainey in the Los Angeles Times, but the imminent return of the Fairness Doctrine is a “false alarm.” President-elect Obama has explicitly said he’s against reinstating the doctrine, and despite the occasional wistful remark by Democratic leaders, they know they don’t have the votes to bring it back. “There’s no clamor about reining in talk radio anywhere but on talk radio,” said Brian O’Neill in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. And I’ve a feeling Rush, Sean, and company will drop the subject once Obama takes office. After eight awkward years in power, the high priests of resentment and outrage are returning to their natural habitat: the opposition. They “must be drooling at the possibilities.”