New FCC chair wants to revoke broadcast licenses; First Amendment might stop him
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
How many people still tune in via OTA antennae? How does the value of broadcast TV compare to other possible uses of that RF spectrum?
>supposed anti-conservative bias.
CNN and MSNBC are at all time low viewership, reported trust in the media is at a historic low. This mistrust is due to intense partisan bias in most news sources.
Fox News started it and every other news source ended up copying them. Now we are in a disastrous state where journalists have mostly become partisan propagandists and nobody trusts them.
It’s bad and honestly the whole system should be reworked. Some kind of fairness doctrine needs to be reintroduced.
Ars pretending like they and other publications don’t have a strong bias is a huge part of the problem.
Ah, yes, force everyone to present "both sides" of issues with a half-dozen sides, none of them optimal. That'll work.
The fairness doctrine only applies to public airwaves. Fox, CNN, and MSNBC are all run on private cable infrastructure: no public resources (e.g., radio frequencies) are used in their dissemination, and so the public/government does not get to tell them what they can(not) say.
The thing about bias is that it's always a problem with the other guy, somehow.
I recall learning about The Fairness Doctrine in college and being very confused about the existence of Fox News only in the next few sentences to discover that it was *yet another* great policy dismantled by the Reagan administration... The birth of Fox News quickly followed.
> CNN and MSNBC are at all time low viewership... Fox News started it and every other news source ended up copying them.
I would love to read a study on this outcome for CNN and MSNBC. Folks to the left don't seem to get their information from television whereas folks to the right gobble up hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of TV news per year. Such an intriguing dichotomy.
The timing isn't coincidental. They've both got the same cause -- a strategy of casting doubt on whether actual news is possible at all, and so propaganda is just as good as journalism. That strategy has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Yes that's fair to point out. The Doctrine wasn't updated for developing tech and needed to be, but instead was revoked.
The Fairness Doctrine might have saved us a lot of grief when it came to hate radio. But even that is less important now that we have social media. The First Amendment dramatically limits how much you can regulate that.
A proper update would have required a Constitutional amendment. Personally, I'd love to see something like Germany's Basic Law: "Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority." But a Constitutional amendment is an extremely high bar to clear.