The Dangers of Fairness

Those following American politics might be familiar with something known as the Fairness Doctrine. The nuts and bolts of it would basically require radio broadcasters to devote equal time to differing opinions. The Democratic party is strongly pushing for this bill as they feel they are being underrepresented on the nation's airwaves. For many years, radio has been dominated by right wing talk shows. Liberal shows such as Air America have been introduced but are considerably less popular. Therefore, the Democrats feel the need to force broadcasters to give them an equal voice, or so they say. There has been a lot of talk about the Fairness Doctrine lately but it is nothing new. To my knowledge, the concept was originally introduced during the Clinton administration but was later shot down by house Republicans. Now that the Democrats, who control the executive and both houses, want to resurrect it.

On the outset, such a law would make sense as you don't want one view to have too much air time. However, it is curious in the fact that the Doctrine singles out radio. Most major television and print media in the United States has a liberal bias. The New York Times, USA Today, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC are all liberal. It is commonly claimed that they are in fact Conservative despite no proof to back this up. Sean Hannity hardly anchors all of CNN alone and Ted Turner is as much a raving liberal lunatic as you can get. FOX News is the only mainstream Conservative TV news network in the country. If the Fairness Doctrine was truely fair as it claims to be, it would also apply to the liberal dominated television and print media, yet it does not. I applies only to conservative dominated radio. So I guess controlling 95% of all media is not enough for liberals and to make things truly fair and balanced, they need to control 97.5% of it. What we have here is blantant censorship by liberals to try and scilence conservatives. If it had been a case of the other way around, there would probably be mass outrage. The media is still a business and should give consumers what they want without government control impossed on it. If liberals can produce a successful program, they should fully be allowed to do so. Conservatives have done this, with hugely popular radio personalities such as Rush Limbaugh. For a group that always claims to be under attack, it seems that American liberals are the ones launching most of the attacks, and abusing their law making powers to do so. Of course this is different from political ads during elections, where a demand for balance accross all networks in regards of allowing advertising is reasonable.

Canadian media is a little different. Could this happen here? Possibly but the Canadian government has done a pretty good job at staying out of the media, notwithstanding the ludicrous "Candian content" rules.