The Fairness Doctrine was defective because it did not protect the public from the propaganda, lies, non-verified/non-fact checked, speculation, opinions, and distortions of truth, smears campaigns, fear-mongering, xenophobia and racism, that is being produced every day by mainstream news media and cable channel “news” shows like Fox News.
The defect of the Fairness Doctrine that was exploited was that its guidelines did not protect the public, but rather mandated that “both sides” of an issue be covered in the news and given equal time before the public. This was abused to create reasonable doubt in the public mind and then used to advance a deleterious libertarian free market ideology and policy agenda by a small group of scientists working for the administrations of republican presidents to obscure the truth of settled science on a number of consequential issues.
“The Merchants of Doubt”, a book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway provides a detailed exposé of how these scientists working for republican administrations attacked settled scientific truths that were not even in question as there was general consensus in the scientific community based on the scientific method, peer reviewed validation, that had already definitively scientifically settled these matters. We are still very much living with this type of media manipulation of facts and reality by a mass corporate media and cable news outlets that today continue to spread propaganda, lies, conspiracy theories, delusional speculations, radically extreme conservative and opinions, hate-mongering and race-baiting xenophobia even though the Fairness Doctrine was stopped by Ronald Reagan’s FCC in 1987.
The United States needs a law that protects the public from mass manipulation by the unscrupulous, self-serving corporate and cable media empires that control the airwaves and much of the press. We need a law that requires fact-checking and proscribes the dissemination of non-factual, non-verified, non-vetted information that is speculative or deceptive or manipulative and ideologically or politically based. This new law would require that it is the news source’s responsibility to prove the veracity of the content it disseminates. Speculative and opinion editorial content should all be required to provide disclaimers to alert the public that that is what is being reported, speculations or opinions that are not necessarily factual in nature. So, viewer be warned.
The law that is needed is not the Fairness Doctrine. But rather it would have to be a law to protect the public, not demand equal time on settled matters which, as we now know, can be used to muddy the waters, confuse or scare the public, and create reasonable doubt when there really is no actual reasonable doubt.
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