FCC Chairman Plans to Delete "Fairness Doctrine" From Federal Code

[spidey07]

Of course you can provide proof of that claim, right?

He's not counting ham radio or anything like that. Now THAT is a public spectrum. His kind only want control and ability to control speech. It the progressive way.

 

[Bowfinger]

Traffic jams mean that people get to places more slowly than they would otherwise. Sufficient broadcast interference means that it doesn't get there at all.

Broadcast spectrum crowding is a regular issue that the FCC is constantly dealing with, it's a big problem for a lot of wireless data currently, as the old styles of broadcast control so much of it. I'm not sure how you don't know this. There are currently quite a few cities in the US where there are no more licenses available for new broadcasts (Jacksonville for example).

Seriously, stop talking. You're making the anti-fairness doctrine people look bad.

No kidding. There are reasonable arguments to be made both for and against the Fairness Doctrine. Trying to draw an analogy to public roads isn't one of them. It's not just a dumb analogy, it's a fail analogy.

Point of fact, public roadways are heavily regulated by the government to ensure fair access to all. No one person or company is allowed to monopolize a significant number of roads, or even a single road. In fact, if you want more than a minuscule sliver (what, something like 70-85' by 8' depending on local regulations), you have to meet special requirements and get special permits. If you want a substantially bigger piece of roadway, well, you have to switch to a different "media" like rail. Weight, vehicle equipment, speed, right of way, stopping and going, lane usage: all tightly regulated. Broadcast regulations are wide open by comparison.

 

[Bowfinger]

He's not counting ham radio or anything like that. Now THAT is a public spectrum. His kind only want control and ability to control speech. It the progressive way.

And you still can't make an argument without lying. Weak. Perhaps you should change your handle to Fail07.

 

[spidey07]

And you still can't make an argument without lying. Weak. Perhaps you should change your handle to Fail07.

Make the case for regulating political speech then. You haven't.

Me and citizens united along with the supreme court so say fuck be upon you.

 

[Bowfinger]

There are infinite alternatives thus what left is really talking about with "fairness" is leftist alternative must be presented, patently unfair.

I'm not quite sure what you're suggesting. The fact that there is no perfect solution to "fairness" doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything. The Fairness Doctrine worked well for many years. Not perfectly, but well.

 

[Bowfinger]

Make the case for regulating political speech then. You haven't.

Me and citizens united along with the supreme court so say fuck be upon you.

Right. That's because the only ones talking about regulating political speech are people like you. I've pointed out numerous times that it's not being restricted at all, an inconvenient fact you ignore in favor of incessant straw man arguments.

If you have any interest in productive debate, go back and respond directly and specifically to those points instead of flinging random poo you hope might stick.

 

[Corn]

He's not counting ham radio or anything like that. Now THAT is a public spectrum. His kind only want control and ability to control speech. It the progressive way.

Spidey, Eskimospy has stated in this thread he does not wish for the fairness doctrine to be enforced. Please keep up with the discussion.

 

[wuliheron]

Spidey, Eskimospy has stated in this thread he does not with for the fairness doctrine to be enforced. Please keep up with the discussion.

Too many beers, too many bong hits.

 

[Corn]

Right. That's because the only ones talking about regulating political speech are people like you. I've pointed out numerous times that it's not being restricted at all, an inconvenient fact you ignore in favor of incessant straw man arguments.

If you have any interest in productive debate, go back and respond directly and specifically to those points instead of flinging random poo you hope might stick.

How can you state with a straight face that your deisre to force an entity who editorializes a position that they MUST provide a platform of equal time to an opposing opinion is not somehow "regulating political speech" simply leaves me breathless. This exemplifies regulating political speech to a "T". Perhaps you should look up the definition of "regulation".

LOL, in the world of the typical lefty, up is really down. You and Spidey have more in common than you would like........

 

[Bowfinger]

How can you state with a straight face that your deisre to force an entity who editorializes a position that they MUST provide a platform of equal time to an opposing opinion is not somehow "regulating political speech" simply leaves me breathless. This exemplifies regulating political speech to a "T". Perhaps you should look up the definition of "regulation".

LOL, in the world of the typical lefty, up is really down. You and Spidey have more in common than you would like........

Whereas only in a nutter mind like yours would "providing fair access for alternative points of view" constitute "regulating political speech." There's more earlier in the thread. You're just trolling, however, so I won't bother to go over it again.

 

[Zebo]

I'm not quite sure what you're suggesting. The fact that there is no perfect solution to "fairness" doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything. The Fairness Doctrine worked well for many years. Not perfectly, but well.

I'm not old enough to remember a world w/o Rush so I'm curious what do you mean it worked well? Well is not to listen for me. I listen/read stuff that keeps it real.

 

[spidey07]

Whereas only in a nutter mind like yours would "providing fair access for alternative points of view" constitute "regulating political speech." There's more earlier in the thread. You're just trolling, however, so I won't bother to go over it again.

Wow. True believer you are.

You are still mandating a message, by rule of law, against free speech.

You are the poster child for a liberal/progressive. May the mightiest of fuck be upon you. Get out of our free country. I'll pay you to leave. Get out dark stain upon liberty. Get out.

"fair access"?

What the fuck is wrong with you? Form your own network and preach your vile words. Oh, wait, you did that and The People said "don't want".

Keep talking. Please keep talking. Witness the mind of a liberal in action. This is how they think, this is what they believe.

 

[Craig234]

People are free to turn this shit off and read whatever they want.

Not only that everyone has a different definition of fair, barring the unfairness of someone deciding, the market decides and I can't think of a better arbiter of ideas.

You still don't get the point about money dominating the system.

This 'free market' is something you don't understand too well IMO, it's not as consumer-driven as you think it is. It's not only 'individuals choosing what they'd like'.

Fact is, that's part of it, and we're sure a lot better off with, say, our media choices than Soviet citizens were where there was no 'free market'.

But you aren't getting how those choices are also allowing money to help some do better than others, to limit consumer choices, with an illusion of 'free choice'.

Publications that can have large marketing budgets do better simple for having more money behind them, not because they're better. It's a combination of people's preference, and the money spent marketing something. Publications that are subsidized to build markets are more likely to get more sales.

I've made the analogy of soda or bottled water, with tap water. If you look at what a rational consumer would do, it's not what many consumers do.

On the one hand, let's take bottled water, you have a product that is unregulated for safety, environmentally terrible (using many times more water to make for each unit made, tens of billions of plastic bottles trashed annually), that is far more expensive, that you generally have to go to some hassle to buy and carry (for soda, add bad for you).

Tap water, on the other hand, has the opposite qualities - more safety regulation, far better for the environment, practically free, easily available.

But bottles water has something tap water doesn't: marketing. Ads with rivers and smiling people drinking it, shelf space people see to buy it in stores, a little mini vacation to Fiji or Hawaii or a mountain spring (or perhaps more likely, the tap water at an industrial site in New Jersey but a pretty name on a label) - and far more soda, why, it's the Real Thing (tm). People are bombarded with marketing, they become trained to want the soda or bottled water, and they spend a fortune on it.

There are some people who make the 'free choice' to use tap water more instead of those products when every factor except *sometimes* 'taste' - not so much with bottled water - heavily favors the one without the marketing budgets. But that doesn't change there being a $100 billion markets for bottled water alone, much less soda. Look at poor people - so often buying soda they can't afford that's bad for them.

People have the free choice to go buy good quality books on social issues and get informed. How often do you see people choosing that over American Idol?

Which have the greater marketing presence? That's money talking.

It works the same in buying public opinion. The management of Chevron decided that they'd rather spend tens of millions of dollars to buy public opinion, that it would be more profitable to them to 'counter' the public having bad opinions about them for, say, things like the multi-billion dollar lawsuit for oil pollution in Ecuador (what's that, the corporate media hasn't covered that you say?) or a backlash on the BP oil disaster, than they would like to buy tens of millions of dollars of new equipment, or pay it to employees, or pay it to shareholders. I'm not sure how widespread the campaign is since it started out targetting a couple markets including San Francisco, but it's on constantly here - not saying much of substance, but using sophisticated propaganda techniques where it tries to use a 'nice person' to represent Chevron, and puts up someone outside the company making it so you can't tell which is which, with a big 'WE AGREE' slogan, to make it seem like they're nothing but a big 'help the public' organization. The do this big advertising and buy public opinion - forcing their message how nice a company they are onto the public in ways that are probably 10,000 times louder than any honest critics get to do with any info critical of the company - for a reason. And it's got little to do with your simple 'free market' idea. Why, if consumers wanted the facts instead of the corporate propaganda, they'd just stop watching the most popular tv shows that carry the ads - tv shows whose purpose is to get ratings to sell its sponsors' products - and go find alternative media publications with the stories. Ya, right. Free market working well!

On the other hand, just a few minutes a week on these same shows of free airtime for the nation's best public service organizations who might tell a bit of the 'other side' of oil company issues - airtime they can't begin to buy because they don't have the profits a major seller of fuel does - would go a long way in the 'public discussion of public issues'. Democracy would be served far better than it is with only the corporate message getting to buy public opinion - especially now with news largely sold out.

Funny thing, the corporate media owners at a time of the most consolidated ownership in history have seemed to realize their news products are owned by the same company that sells the advertising for entertainment products to Chevron. It doesn't mean the oil spill won't get covered - not doing that would lead to someone else pointing it out, and the public getting a bad opinion of the corporate media - but it's done in an awfully corporate-friendly manner mostly.

And even the networks who do better on the news - find themselves selling to the same interests to get their propaganda out. There are times I've watched a liberal news show do a story heavily criticizing a company - and then the commercial break has a propaganda ad by the same company, paying for that show (we haven't seen a Greenpeace ship yet named "Rainbow Warrior, sponsored by Exxon", but we come close).

These corporate interests don't sponsor charities because they're 'nice', they do it because they get more value in PR than from keeping the profits.

Taking a look at the Chevron ad campaign:

Environmental groups have responded to Chevron's previous attempts to improve its image with their own ads and protests. Earlier this month, broom-carrying activists in hazmat suits demonstrated outside Chevron stations in San Francisco and called on the company to "clean up" its operations.

"Chevron's rhetoric and the public image that they put forward is very different from how they're actually operating," said Maria Ramos, campaign director for the Rainforest Action Network, the environmental group that organized the protests.

Chevron has enlisted the help of outside groups to push back against such criticism. Some of the new ads are signed by non-profit groups that work with Chevron, such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and Cleantech Open, an organization that promotes companies specializing in renewable energy and green technologies.

"Is this dancing with the devil? We think not," Cleantech Open executive director Rex Northen said. "We think that if we're going to make a difference we really have to bring all the parties to the table."

If the public wants AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria fought, if it wants green technology advanced, it has something called a 'democratic government' and tax money it can spend to do those things - it can't rely on the nice companies. But in today's environment, it's easy for groups who want to do those things to find they can't get government funding, with Congress dominated by corporate-sponsored people, and they might have to beg from companies for these social issues - returning PR ammo.

You said 'people can turn the propaganda off', but when the money is on one side, it doesn't really work that way - the top entertainment products that people want to watch the most can and do charge ad prices that only the monied interests can pay. Just as people will hurt their own local economy to save a bit at Wal-Mart, they're going to watch shows they want to watch regardless of the ads paying for them.

Money largely buys public opinion - and the public pays a lot for that. It takes nothing more than a Coca-Cola logo at sporting events, buses, store displays... how many times to consumers see the Coca-cola logo for each time they're presented with health information - much less sophisticated advertising 'selling' them against soda, that basically doesn't even exist?

Sure, they're 'free to decide not to buy Coca-cola' in the 'free markets', but the money buys a whole lot of changing public behavior to do so.

It's almost always one-sided by a thousand to one or more. A rare experimental exception that may only be in California is that cigarettes taxes were used to buy advertising agency ads aired to the public actually against smoking, taking on the tobacco ads like a competitor - and I think they've worked pretty well, as between things like that and the government actually restricting money buying tobacco opinion by restricting ads on places like tv, have worked to slash smoking rates, to actually have an 'informed public' being more rational generally, to where almost 100% of smokers start when they are vulnerable in their teens and kept with nicotine addiction, most of them seeming to 'hate the dirty habit' and would prefer not to.

This could be contrasted with the years after tobacco's health problems were found, but advertising was still dominant, and smoking rates remained quite high.

The fairness doctrine wouldn't even have helped with the smoking ads - but it might let just a bit of the public's interest get some airtime against monied interests.

The 'fairness doctrine' is highly exaggerated as what it does - I don't have any numbers, but I recall it was very rare to see any 'counter point' because of it.

So while liberals might defend it for the public interest, it's really all but a non-issue practically. There are far bigger problems with money buying opinion and elections.

Save234

 

[Craig234]

Make the case for regulating political speech then. You haven't.

Me and citizens united along with the supreme court so say fuck be upon you.

You can't tell the difference between 'democracy benefits from all sides of public issues getting to be heard', and Pravda, hence your using misleading phrases.

The Supreme Court said 8-0 that the fairness doctrine is constitutionally just fine and not a violation of free speech.

You want 'the case for free speech'? Go read the FCC on it before Reagan's appointees.

That paraphrase I quoted above is paraphrasing the FCC from 1949.

 

[Craig234]

Once again, I'm glad that it's gone for good now. Not that it hasn't been gone for years and years and years now, but finally the people who listen to too much Rush Limbaugh will need to find a new boogeyman to perpetuate their culture of victimhood. After all this time of the FAIRNESS DOCTRINE BEING RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER, dire warnings every time a Democrat was elected, finally a Democratic president's administration got rid of it completely out of a request due to simple disuse.

It made sense when there were only 3 stations, in those cases differing viewpoints could be legitimately crowded out. Nowadays if you can't find a viewpoint that suits yours, you aren't even trying to look.

I have to agree, it's become nearly a moot point - it's more just a romantic attachment to the idea that there is any such thing as 'for the community', from the airwaves to national parks to public beaches to public libraries - it's less that there is that much benefit now to the Fairness Doctrine, not that it was ever that big a deal, than the right-wing reasons for opposing it, that seem to embrace 'the privatization of everything' as why they are against it.

Our nation is approaching a time - following the right-wing 'starve the beat' public policy to get the government not to take care of citizens, to benefit the rich, when there will be more and more 'sell off all assets' policies pushed, to privatize more and more to raise desperate cash, screwing the public.

I've written about things like the example from Matt Taibbi about Chicago selling off all profits from city parking meters for the next 75 years to a secretive investment group it appears is largely Dubai - giving that politicians a nice political slogan for one year about balancing the budget, but screwing the people of Chicago the next 74 years (naturally, taking a huge loss over time, but he doesn't care about that).

There's a project I just heard about to review US land holdings - tens of thousands - looking for ones to sell of to raise some cash. That's another start of this.

It's worked so well for third world countries, who find their payments on debt dominate their budgets and their education budgets might be 1/100 of that amount.

Everyone knows the phrase, 'Power tends to corrupt, absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely', but many don't understand you can substitute power with money.

The public should embrace the principle behind the Fairness Doctrine as protecting its own interest, but ironically, the highly sold anti-government propaganda prevents it.

If we were just talking about the Fairness Doctrine, it's a much smaller deal. But we're more talking about the protection of democracy itself - which is not in good shape, with our LESS Wall Street friendly candidate who ran on 'change' to fix the economic crisis brought on by Wall Street, having his largest private donor be the Wall Street firm that did more than any other to cause the crisis - and zero criminal prosecutions and mostly lip service 'reform'. But hey, 'the market spoke' and that's what the people want, right?

 

[Bowfinger]

Wow. True believer you are.

You are still mandating a message, by rule of law, against free speech.

You are the poster child for a liberal/progressive. May the mightiest of fuck be upon you. Get out of our free country. I'll pay you to leave. Get out dark stain upon liberty. Get out.

"fair access"?

What the fuck is wrong with you? Form your own network and preach your vile words. Oh, wait, you did that and The People said "don't want".

Keep talking. Please keep talking. Witness the mind of a liberal in action. This is how they think, this is what they believe.

More lies and delusions from the P&N loon. You really should seek professional help. Seriously. There must be medications that can help.

 

[wuliheron]

More lies and delusions from the P&N loon. You really should seek professional help. Seriously. There must be medications that can help.

Modern medicine can only do so much and that doesn't include performing miracles.

 

[Bowfinger]

I'm not old enough to remember a world w/o Rush so I'm curious what do you mean it worked well? Well is not to listen for me. I listen/read stuff that keeps it real.

I mean that broadcasters did a reasonable job of covering diverse points of view without any notable abuses by the powers that be.

 

[spidey07]

More lies and delusions from the P&N loon. You really should seek professional help. Seriously. There must be medications that can help.

Explain your position in support of regulating free speech.

Your liberal message us not what people want to hear.

Explain why you want the rule of law to force it.

Explain. Explain. Explain. Exterminate. Exterminate. Exterminate!

 

[Zebo]

Well Craig that was an interesting read and I'll prolly read it again but I don't drink bottle water, or soda because it's a waste of money and garbage. Free choice. I only drink tap water and straight whiskey. Free choice. I also don't watch TV much but movies on netflix. Free choice. Just like anyone else is free. If they choose to buy into corporate propaganda that's their choice. Maybe they like it?

 

[Bowfinger]

Explain your position in support of regulating free speech. ...

I have, several times. Unfortunately, you are incapable of reading the words because they don't fit within your deluded, extremist world view. Your cognitive dissonance blinds you to anything challenging your faith.

Get well soon.