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Comment by skidoo | Hacker News Reader

To be more clear, the Fairness Doctrine was dismantled by the Reagan administration and permanently shelved by Obama himself, meaning that for the press in America to be held accountable for its own actions is now somehow contrary to their constitutional rights to free speech. I think the full implications are just barely being seen publicly, but essentially, non-biased media is absolutely a thing of the past.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine

And while citizen journalism can allow for unbiased reporting, with no editorial guidelines or presence then it also opens the floodgates for citizen journalism to be even less restrained than commercial media in terms of lunacy.

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The problem with the Fairness Doctrine is that it requires you to devote equal time to the other "side" without regard to how reasonable it is. Equal time for rabidly political anti-vaxxers? Oh joy.

Giving equal time to absolute nutters only serves to legitimize them.

And I also take issue with this: non-biased media is absolutely a thing of the past.

Depends on what you mean by non-biased. It's impossible to have a complete lack of bias for a couple of reasons. First because there's inherent bias in the stories you choose to cover, and second because a dry reporting of facts absent any kind of analysis is terrifically boring and less informative than the alternative.

The best thing you could do as a journalism group in such a case would be to remove yourself from commercial influence, and take an objective a stance as possible on the stories you choose to publish and how you analyze them. Being permanently vigilant of the inherent bias goes a long way towards correcting it, IMHO.

"while citizen journalism can allow for unbiased reporting"

I would say that's really not true. I am trying to think of a time when we didn't have biased media or citizenry. Newspapers have picked candidates forever and its pretty easy to see their leanings. Humans believe things and it shows in the reporting.

Part of this stems from people's weird belief that politics was more polite in the early days, which is just so much trash from "a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse-swapper and the nightman."

The demise of the Fairness Doctrine was an acknowledgement of reality and a 1st amendment win. The government has no place holding anyone accountable for speech other than as an action of an aggrieved party in the courts.

Our problem these days, is that we really don't have news networks. News networks don't make money. We have pundit networks. No one is doing an actual news broadcast. They all have their political point of view.

You do realize we're discussing the Independent, a UK newspaper, not subject to the Fairness Doctrine or the lack thereof, right?

I'm implying what's happening in the UK is not a new or uncommon thing. Real freedom of the press is on its way out the door in general, which I think should suggest that any ideal of a healthy democracy is a pipedream, particularly when the freest nations are increasingly convoluted.

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