22 thoughts on “Obama Opposes ‘Fairness Doctrine’ Revival?”

  1. It’s one thing for Obama to be against it, but it’s something else when Pelosi, Reid, et. al are for it. Let’s hope Obama doesn’t cave in to the far left on this one.

  2. So since radio and TV stations aren’t required to broadcast news, and they aren’t required to give us both sides of the issue so we can make informed decisions, aren’t really required to do anything any more, what exactly do they give us in return for letting them monetize the public airwaves that We, The People own?

    Please tell me, President Obama. I’m all ears.

  3. June last year: http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/114322-Obama_Does_Not_Support_Return_of_Fairness_Doctrine.php

    It’s well known that he doesn’t support the return of the Fairness Doctrine, and the Dems will be absolutely crazy to push for something like that. They aren’t nearly as crazy, otherwise wouldn’t have won in 20006 and 2008 the way they did.

    But if you fear that an amendment to the constitution erasing term limits for the president is going to pass one of these days and that Obama=Chavez, then, well, it makes sense.

  4. Eduardo,

    Yeah, I remember some years back reading all sorts of snide comments about how absurd it was to believe Hugo Chavez=fidel castro. Time will tell, tho, wont it?

    Please promise to comment when that Fairness Doctrine gets slipped into the next emergency bailout bill. Something similar has already happened, and for the internet no less.

  5. I see no letting go by liberals. Nationalize the auto industry? No problem.
    Nationalize healthcare? No problem. Spend infinitely more than Bush? Obama wonderful – Bush bad.
    It seems no matter how audacious Obama is, liberals think he’s the greatest.
    Do what Bush does when he promised the opposite? No problem.
    What will it take to wake up the left or at least the rest of those who voted for Obama that we picked the wrong guy?
    I don’t know if it’s true, but now there may be a move afoot to allow Palestinians (who voted for Hamas) to claim they must have refugee status here because of their plight. They’ll get housing, etc. on our taxes. Please let this idiocy not be true.

  6. Something like the Fairness Doctrine will get passed, but not under that name. It will have a nice name to go with it.

  7. Matt,

    The “public” airwaves were only “public” because of the limited broadcast spectrum. That’s last century. Today with satellites and compression and HD radio and internet there is no reason to require such things from broadcasters. The market dictates what’s successful. If people demand balanced reporting then the most balanced broadcasters will have the most viewers. The fact is that the old media was never balanced despite the “fairness” doctrine. That’s why Cable and AM radio exploded when new voices like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly emerged.

  8. Henry –

    First, while spectrum is unlimited in theory, there are practical limitations. An upper limit where everyone exposed gets cooked, a lower limit where everyone exposed vomits incessantly and all the small capillaries in their bodies burst. These practical limits define a band quite a bit narrower than the theoretical infinity you are talking about.

    Second, that spectrum still has to be managed. An environment of unmanaged spectrum is also known as an electronic warfare battlefield. Allowing broadcasters to use whatever frequencies they like would lead to absolute chaos. Saying that new broadcast technology has changed the basic nature of the spectrum is akin to saying that the practice of charging for real estate was rendered arcane by the advent of the skyscraper.

    If spectrum is now free, why do cell phone and satellite companies have to pay billions to the FCC in order to use it? Google put up $10 billion to try to get a chunk of spectrum in the last auction, and lost to Verizon. TV and radio are the only long range broadcasters that get it for free.

    So spectrum has enormous financial value, we give it to the networks for free, and they give us nothing at all in return.

    This makes sense how?

  9. Just because the government can charge for something doesn’t mean it has to charge for it or that it is scarce.

    Besides you didn’t address the main point which is that the fairness doctrine was the furthest thing from fair. Conservative points of view were NEVER seen or heard. It’s not like conservatism was born the day Rush Limbaugh was syndicated in the late 80s.

  10. Spectrum for broadcasting over a long range is pretty scarce. Spectrum for short range broadcasts, like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and garage door openers, is much less scarce by its nature. Still scarce, and that will become a problem in the next 10 years or so, but right now it’s not an issue.

    And the FCC regulations reflect this. They don’t auction off Wi-Fi frequencies, or home automation frequencies, or TV remote control frequencies, etc… They just set them aside.

    Broadcasting over the internet is a whole other thing, which is what Wi-Fi radio is. Bandwidth is scarce, but that gets reflected in the price you pay to use and access it.

    I’d argue that Rush isn’t a conservative at all :), but I understand what you are saying. And I can see that the uneven and unfair application of the law was less fair than allowing market forces to dictate what gets aired. My point is that we need either better legislation that is fair, or we need to start charging networks for their spectrum since they are no longer providing a public service.

    It works both ways, by the way. I haven’t seen any newscast trying to poke holes in the impenetrable wall that is Obama’s endless supply of bailout plans.

  11. “better legislation” is an oxymoron at best and an impossibility out of this congress. The thing about wifi is that municipalities are become more and more wifi friendly like in south beach. Yes the spectrum is scarce but you only need a small bit of it to access the entire internet universe. The justification of the fairness doctrine was that diversity of opinion needed to be heard. But its precisely that diversity that the Democrats in congress want to tamp down on. The market is the most fair way to determine what gets heard. The only bias the market has is toward success. That is when left untampered with (not like the housing market in the 2000s).

  12. Agreed about legislation.

    But then allowing TV and radio stations free access to a scarce, publicly owned resource that has an established market value is tampering with the market as well, isn’t it? It raises the prices paid by cell phone and satellite companies, which subsidizes radio and TV’s free use of the spectrum, so it’s also a form of wealth redistribution. Spectrum is not a free market at all.

    And maybe the market would decide that it would rather have cheaper cell phone service than 60 radio stations or 200 TV stations in an area if given the choice.

    The current situation can’t really be justified any better than the previous one 🙂

  13. Matt, what the hell are you smoking? Rush is not a conservative? Reagan was not a conservative? Then who is? I’m dying to know what is required under your criteria to be called a “conservative.”

  14. My point is that the scarcity of spectrum is VERY QUICKLY becoming irrelevant. The excuse for monitoring and censoring broadcasting is becoming thinner every day. There’s a reason cable broadcasters don’t have to conform to FCC standards, same with satellite radio. Same with internet. It’s an old model based on a situation that existed 60 years ago when ownership of media was extremely limited because of the high costs partially to do with broadcast spectrum.

  15. George –

    A conservative is someone who believes in a small, weak, non-intrusive central government. That’s the definition under our founding principles, and the only one I believe matters.

    Reagan and Limbaugh are/were neo-conservatives. They espouse lower taxes, but not the smaller government that’s supposed to be the reason a conservative government doesn’t need as much revenue. They apply non-interventionist policies to business only, when business isn’t even a defined entity under our Constitution, and leave the People at the mercy of commerce. And they intertwine moral conservativism, which has nothing to do with political or fiscal conservativism and is not the province of the federal government at any rate, into almost position they take.

    They are conservatives only when compared to what passes for liberals nowadays.

  16. Henry – The irrelevance of the availability of short range spectrum is a temporary situation only. Anyone who has ever had to change the channels on their home wi-fi network has seen a glimpse of what’s coming down the road in the next decade. The laws of physics are fairly unforgiving.

    Maybe the answer is to switch to a strictly managed (but free) all wi-fi model. Best of all worlds, spectrum suitable for long range broadcasts will become a free public resource (aside from that reserved for stuff like military, ATC, etc…) for communication between internet nodes, and we pay for our local access and get what we want. Then we’ll have a free market.

  17. “A conservative is someone who believes in a small, weak, non-intrusive central government. That’s the definition under our founding principles, and the only one I believe matters.”

    Absolutely. So do I. But that is a libertarian position. You sound more libertarian than conservative. Conservatism, as I practice it, includes a variety of social issues in its matrix of beliefs. Abortion, for example. Libertarians are the ones who could care less what an individual does or does not do; conservatives cannot condone the murder of the unborn.

  18. The way I see it Libertarians are the last true conservatives, and the definition of conservative has been “warped”, for lack of a better term, to a more globalist definition instead of one specific to our model of government.

    Maybe just semantics. But either way, I don’t see how neo-cons fit any definition of conservatism.

  19. I cannot be a libertarian because they see no need for war or defense. Ron Paul soundsed like a crackpot in those debates, unaware of the real world.

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