As a United States immigrant, I had never heard of the fairness doctrine before. My first thought is: how would it be compatible with the freedom of the press granted by the First Amendment?
It should be obvious here that even the most succinctly and universally stated rights have certain correct limits needed to protect society from individual selfishness.
So the fairness doctrine can be seen as compatible with the first amendment in exactly the same way that consumer protection laws against false advertising are compatible with the first amendment, because it is observably the case that a media institution selectively using its platform to attempt to control and direct the public mindset in a particular direction is itself a form of intentional public harm for selfish interests.
Fraud and slander are not illegal purely on the basis of content of the speech used to conduct the activities. A sufficiently culpable and provable malicious intent must also exist. It's not fraud or slander to state an opinion one sincerely believes in, and obtain money or credibility for it.
> So the fairness doctrine can be seen as compatible with the first amendment in exactly the same way that consumer protection laws against false advertising are compatible with the first amendment in a world where it is observably the case that a media institution selectively using its platform to direct the public mindset is itself a form of intentional public harm for selfish interests.
I don't think you understand what the fairness doctrine was in practice or why it existed. It's regulation of private conduct. It didn't begin with television, but rather radio at the end of WW2 in an attempt to prevent future Father Caughlins from having access to a private audience over the airwaves. GE and RCA were not their targets. If anything, the fairness doctrine stifled competitive and independent media over the airwaves, with most such individuals and organizations functionally limited to local broadcast where they could get away with it and newsletters.
The doctrine never applied to Voice of America or "friendly" news organizations and the FCC wasn't compelled to apply it equally across the political spectrum (so much for equal liberty under the law!). If one wanted to provide supportive commentary on the Kennedy's invasion of Vietnam without a competing voice denouncing it, one was free to do so without fear of a costly suit or a revoked broadcasting license. Just like most regulations, the fairness doctrine was little more than a selectively used cudgel for political purposes. Even the Wikipedia page for the topic cites members of previous administrations making admitting to it.
Now point me to where the first amendment says "except in cases where a sufficiently culpable and provable malicious intent also exists". It doesn't say that. It makes no concessions and imposes no bounds itself on the right to declare things freely at all. It states the complete and universal right without any caveats whatsoever. And yet here we are anyway with protection laws imposing caveats, and nobody can faithfully claim that product truthful labeling regulations should be declared unconstitutional, because there is no contradiction between the two if read with a clear mind toward building society rather than destroying it.
But the "Anti-Free/Speech Anti-1A ideas = building society" is just a fallacy that have been assumed.
Here, it's even admitted: "It states the complete and universal right without any caveats whatsoever,". then you do the dissonance dance because you don't like that very much.
Our founding fathers should have included a list of definitions (and a list of definitions to those definitions...), but they probably didn't realize how catty their future generations would be, or how much they like being oppressed because it makes them feel safe.
They stated very clearly what it means. You do not like that, so you are playing definition games because you cannot tolerate the reality of the matter.
This causes the lowest common denominator to live and influence the world much more vividly than ever before. And our politicians are super cool with that because it's their secret for creating long political careers.
So, they subsidize the lowest common denominators of society, the ones that would have dunning-krugered themselves ten times over, then the politicians tell them if they want to survive, they have to vote for us, or the other guy will take your livelihood. 9/10 times it's a lie, but they're super easy to manipulate and cheap to subsidize (buy votes - this cheapness is important to their super PACs low cost per vote is just simple business, better to buy one McConnell or Pelosi than 5 fresh faces) so they keep the voters miserable, in pain, and desperate for government help.
But what is this doing to the average competency of humans overall? This group of low-understanders keep demanding that we put together more bureaucracy and regulations slowing down progress so the politicians can look like they're doing something when they should be demanding the opposite and instead pushing for transparency and consumer choice laws. These nip profits pretty badly though, so our bought politicians never push the idea.
Even this Net Neutrality scuffle is just them creating solutions to problems they've already caused with overregulation creating no competition. Then we get the lowest common denominators cheering it and it's just sad.
For a lot of it, yeah, it's called history.
Generally speaking, the consequences we have now are because of what was seen to happen when we didn't have them before. Regulations nearly always happen after the fact. Laws against stealing happen because people are stealing, and that's bad. Laws against murder happen because people are murdering, and that's bad. Laws against putting asbestos in things happen because people are putting asbestos in things, and that's bad. Laws against fraud happen because people are doing fraud, and that's bad. Laws about net neutrality happen because ISPs start enacting or publicly preparing to enact abusive policies. You don't need to remove the consequences. We already know what things were like before we started applying them.
Are the consequences we have now the right consequences? That's a much harder question to answer.
These are unrelated, so I'm not sure how you got there.