(This was content in the embedded video—gestured at in the text.)
Both seem to ignore the fact that whatever worked in year X will not work in year X+50, because the society, technology and politics moved on.
One of the defining movements of the last hundred years was the fact that the cost of disseminating opinions and news was slowly becoming affordable for more and more corporations, small teams or even individuals. Thanks to technological progress, the voices out there multiplied, as did their audience. And people unhappy with a certain journalistic narrative found it cheaper and easier to broadcast their competing perspective.
Such a chaotic world cannot be subject to effective content guidelines such as the defunct fairness doctrine, just like the modern world of highly educated professionals cannot be ruled by hereditary nobility.
Instead of censorship, Capital simply hoarded all the bandwidth, starving alternative voices of attention.
How now are us newly ennobled modern highly educated professionals supposed to hear voices which no longer exist?
The hysterical bit is social media swiped the control away from advertisers. We've replaced your dreaded hereditary nobility with the mythical meritocracy.
That aside, it's not because there is a higher diversity of sources at more diverse scales tosay that the answer is not to look at what worked in the past. Or to simply throw one's hands in the air.
It is not because small ISPs, tech companies, etc. exist that the large conglomerates that impact our daily lives should be left untouched and unregulated. Same goes with news, or masquerades of news.
A good start for instance would to untie news media from the profit motive. NPR exists, the French Radio Publique exists, etc. and they output great content, independently more often than not. It shows that public investment into newsmaking is worthwhile and has often a better quality to it. News reporting should be seen as of public interest, and treated as such rather than as a commodity. Breaking news conglomerates should also be explored.
okay, I'll bite. What is the solution then? We got rid of Fairness Doctrine without putting any other check in place and Fox News successfully argued that no-one in their right mind should take Tucker Carlsen seriously, even though he has the biggest talk show on American TV today. I am guessing they are gonna argue the same in their voter machine cases too.
There should be some way to regulate the news media, no?
To what end? The Fairness Doctrine was little more than a method by which powerful people within the government could service their own vendettas against conservative radio hosts, executed through FCC licensure agreements.
Everything is IP-networked now, and there's no FCC licensure for publishing on the internet so a bloody-minded focus on returning to the glory days of the Fairness Doctrine is really just fighting the last war. Oh and it's effectively government-compelled speech, AKA a blatant and egregious violation of the First Amendment without even the paper thin justification of public-owned airwaves.
And that's not about "fighting the last war"; it's about correcting for the network effects of the Internet that create natural monopolies with too much influence on public discussion.
And that is protecting the free speech rights of users, in an age when the public space is controlled by private corporations, so there's a compelling government interest involved.
This sounds like another repetition of the same bad legal take on the "rhetorical hyperbole" standard based, probably, on the McDougal case or one similar [1]. That argument is made with respect to particular statements, not that nobody would ever believe anything they say. But don't take my word for it, read how the court in that very case talks about the standard:
"In particular, accusations of “extortion,” “blackmail,” and related crimes, such as the statements Mr. Carlson made here, are often construed as merely rhetorical hyperbole when they are not accompanied by additional specifics of the actions purportedly constituting the crime."
You will note that it's limited to particular statements in a particular context, not everything the person ever said for any reason, nor to anything ever said on the show. This same standard was used in, e.g. the case vs. Larry Flynt[2]. The media loves to misrepresent this argument as applying very broadly to everything a person says whenever it comes up in contexts with a political opponent, but the claims made are far narrower and rely largely on people not bothering to read legal rulings or knowing what on earth "rhetorical hyperbole" is to begin with. If you take this as some defense of Tucker, it's not, the other side does exactly the same thing whenever rhetorical hyperbole comes up.
So basically every time you see the meme "can you believe that X argued in court that nobody would ever believe them" you can be sure that you are seeing this tired misrepresentation of the rhetorical hyperbole standard.
Which seems apropos in an article about the media losing trust, as I know from actually reading a lot of court rulings just how uniformly terrible legal reporting is to the point where I actively mistrust all headlines by all outlets and refuse to consider anything but actual court papers off of Pacer.
Outlets love to put out headlines with unreasonable billion dollar defamation claims (even if actual awards are a tiny fraction thereof and they have no realistic hope of getting anything but a headline because their prayer for relief doesn't have a prayer), or to headline meaningless procedural motions as somehow dispositive (The Supreme Court denied a hail Mary petition for a writ of certiorari to decide whether suit could even be brought in the first place? Quelle surprise! The case must be almost over!), or to talk about "harsh questions" during oral arguments (the side that gets questioned more wins slightly more often, they may be trying to shore up the arguments for their ruling). There are far, far more tropes than this, but seriously, if you care at all about accuracy, take a course or two on legal procedure so that you understand the different courts and levels of appeal and actually read legal rulings.
Granted, that takes at least some small amount of legal education, but honestly, the public has neglected legal literacy for far too long.
[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20519858/3-22-21-...
She argued that her beliefs were based on disclosed facts (sworn depositions by others), which is a credible defense against defamation.
Inasmuch as you're claiming that she doesn't argue truth as a defense, that's appears to be true based on skimming this brief, but it's also quite common simply because that puts the burden of proof on you and it's much, much easier to argue most other defenses.
So even when a person truly believes that they're right, they often won't argue this point in court, especially not on a contentious political topic. So failing to argue that point isn't quite the indicator one might normally assume it should be, even if it does tend to appear in slam dunk cases.
N.B. I don't think her allegations here are actually true.
This is true, which means it's important to look at the context.
The fairness doctrine was from a time when there was limited airtime. Things were broadcast and anything so broadcast filled space that couldn't be used by something else. Filling the airwaves with a singular opinion literally prevented any others from being carried. The fairness doctrine was meant to counteract this.
Today that technical problem does not exist. Everything is on demand. The economic cost in terms of storage and bandwidth is so low that the likes of YouTube and Facebook can carry everything published by everyone. Problem solved, right? Just carry everything; completely fair.
Except that they reintroduced the scarcity artificially through market consolidation. There are effectively three major cable news networks and every one of them is aligned with a political party.
Because that's what happens when there are so few of them. If you have dozens then they each carve out a niche. One caters to socialists, another to libertarians, another to moderates etc. You get a greater diversity of viewpoints and, importantly, less tribal warfare because there is more overlap between any given pair of outlets.
And it thwarts the even more problematic attempts by partisans to capture the incumbents and enforce ideological conformity through them, because it's not as effective if you have a dozen other competitors who aren't just shills for the other team (and therefore have credibility) rightfully pointing out the lies told by competitors they otherwise agree with and keeping each other honest.
What we need is less media consolidation. More competition. Applies to the media as much as the tech companies.
I can setup a website or twitter handle and get my ideas published out there, but they drown in a sea of similar opinions. I can't compete with the kind of ideological carpet bombing than Fox News, CNN or MSNBC can produce. Money and Capital can buy a much larger bullhorn, so that is what people listen to.
That's... literally not a "fact". It's a situational thing. I mean, just to be glib: almost everything that "worked" in the 1980's works now. Most things haven't changed!
As far as media balance: yes, clearly balance is a good thing. I think forcing Fox to hand over an hour of coverage every evening between Hannity and Tucker to someone like Chris Hayes can only be a net benefit. MSNBC can slot Ingraham in after Maddow. Both their audiences will win, because the networks will have to find a way to keep eyeballs without outrage.
Fox only works as "Fox" because of the echo chamber effect. And that can absolutely be regulated.
But no, the fairness doctrine has nothing to do with Fox News, it never applied to cable
What would have protected free speech in the first place? Not allowing the dangerous fantasies supplant fact.
There’s plenty of statements that the mainstream media supported that were either flat out wrong and harmful to the American public. We’re still feeling the repercussions of a government hellbent against saturated fats.
At least allowing people to indulge in “dangerous fantasies” lets some of the people be right some of the time, instead of the entire monoculture being dangerously wrong.
You’d be suppressing that too.
Once upon a time, emancipation of slaves or universal suffrage were dangerous fantasies. In China as of today, democratic ideas are a dangerous fantasy.
It is not as if contemporary West is the only society in history that has everything figured out and can only get worse through entertainment of "dangerous fantasies". To the watchers of status quo, every potential change is at least suspect, if not outright dangerous.
So, do you think those ideas deserve to be held up next things like suffrage or the abolishing of slavery? Please, no.
In many ways it accelerated Limbaugh et al because viewers could see they weren’t getting an accurate conservative viewpoint in the mainstream and thus trusted it less, leading to other outlets.
Most surveys going back decades and decades show that 80 or 90%+ of journalists are registered Democrats. That doesn’t make them bad journalists, but they are a monoculture that doesn’t represent the diversity of political views in America.
It’s notable how it really bothers people that there is one right-leaning news network out of a dozen or so left-leaning networks. Apparently it’s not enough to control 90% of the media narrative - it has to be 100%.
Actually, how crazy the situation is, is shown how "conservatives" abandoned Fox News because they did not reflect their reality distortion and moved to even more extreme outlets (I mean who can call newsmax or OAN even news). If someone moved from Fox News to OAN, they were never interested in news, they were after someone feeding their prejudice no matter how unreal they are.
The UK, France, Russia, Austria, Hungary?
They also all participate in laundering of fake news. One of them throws up a totally false story and all of the others repeat it.
As a recent high-profile example, Washington Post falsely claimed that Trump told a Georgia election official to "find the votes", which a later leaked recording proved to be absolutely fabricated (they retracted it). CNN, MSNBC, BBC and other ethically bankrupt organisations printed the lie verbatim.
"CORRECTION: [...] Trump did not tell the investigator to “find the fraud” or say she would be “a national hero” if she did so."
That's a pretty whopping correction that changes the entire story. If he's asking her to investigate the votes to find wrongdoing, then there's absolutely no wrongdoing.
If that doesn’t tell you what the media is about I don’t what is. They literally ran with a story about the president they couldn’t corroborate and it turned out to be lies.
(And I think you're going to need to cite that "80-90%" number, which seems made up. Nothing is that uniform, even CPAC has a bunch of registered libertarians and independents walking around.)
I'm not saying anything was good vs bad, but it's clear why it was a perceived an issue. One political party was taking advantage to revoke the speech of another. Put simply, I could put two left leaning people on my show, but claim one was "conservative" and that was "fair". Honestly, it's no better than now, but at least we all know the truth.
I do agree that the FD revocation leads directly to FOX News and AM talk radio, I just don't think CNN or Crossfire are examples of the phenomenon being discussed. I think people mention Crossfire largely in the context of Jon Stewart criticizing the Tucker Carlson era iteration, which fair cop was bad, and also coincided with an era where CNN phased out real news journalists like Aaron Brown in favour of more idiot talking heads. But I'm just not sure you can draw the causal graph from fairness doctrine to those events ~18-ish years later the same way you can to the rise of talk radio a few years after FD was sunset and FOX News 5 or 6 years after that.