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Comment by nescoiquid | Hacker News Reader

The equal time doctrine was eliminated in 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

>> The fairness doctrine of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), introduced in 1949, was a policy that required the holders of broadcast licenses to both present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was—in the FCC's view—honest, equitable, and balanced. The FCC eliminated the policy in 1987 and removed the rule that implemented the policy from the Federal Register in August 2011.

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And for good reason. It doesn't make sense to mandate equal time for mainstream and fringe positions, rational proposals and ones riddled with contradictions. Either some government censor is responsible for deciding which positions are "serious" enough to warrant equal time or the media eventually gets overwhelmed with nonsense and conspiracy theories. If you want to see where the "fairness doctrine" leads, just have a look at some of the less discriminating social media sites.

Evidence suggests that the fairness doctrine worked really well until we ended it. Until it’s elimination mass media news in the US was pretty middle of the road.

I feel there should be some laws for when someone calls themselves news or journalism. So no monopoly for news, but when does call themselves this, there should be some ethical and truth finding considerations attached.

>there should be some ethical and truth finding considerations attached.

But who decides what's true? And why should we let them? Majority consensus is an easy answer, but we'd need something else if we were to regulate truth at a level we could enforce on journalists.

I'm personally more worried about that question spiraling out of control than I am about offering equal air time.

Truth might not be the best word, but the intention is about factual and empirical observations. So news/journalism is X happened at Y, backed up with as much sources as the journalist can muster.

What it means is not news, thats opinion.

Was it truly that? What evidence?

Seems to me around the time that it was ended there were several other things going on.

The advent of cable news networks which gave a massive incentive to sensationalism and strong partisan ties as multiple players joined the space with a need to create a sustainable viewership.

Satellite feeds became common ensuring a single message instead of having a layer of abstraction in the form of a local or regional newscaster; instead of relaying facts, they can relay a highly opinionated version.

Local and independent news stations were being purchased and consolidated into national telecom companies with their own partisan editorial bends, a la Nexstar and Sinclair.

I have to believe that all of the above had a much greater influence on news discourse in the past few decades than the elimination of the fairness doctrine. Furthermore, if you give government the power to regulate anything; always expect the current party in power to use that regulation as a weapon. Can you imagine what our leaders would do given even more power to control and manipulate the media narrative? Ending this was a good decision.

A much better reason to get rid of equal time policies is because on the Internet, spectrum is effectively unlimited.

On TV or radio, you can only have so many stations. But with the internet, people can make a new web site and publish there, they're not limited by the available spectrum. Therefore, the kind of regulation that was needed in a constrained environment (broadcasted TV/Radio), does not really make sense when those constraints are lifted.

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