That's why the Democrats in Congress want to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, of course. The FCC's rationale for imposing the Fairness Doctrine is tied to the scarcity of broadcast spectrum and licenses. It's not clear to me as a retired lawyer who practiced telecommunications law for 30 years, that this rationale continues to be valid in light of increased competition from cable, satellite radio, Internet, etc. But, who knows what the courts would decide.
If Congress does reimpose the Fairness Doctrine along with McCain'spromisedthreatened extension of McCain-Feingold, we will have to hope that Justice Kennedy sticks with his dissent in the original holding that McCain-Feingold is constitutional. It is highly frustrating to me when people speak of balancing Rush Limbaugh with the likes of Randi Rhodes because we need Rush to balance "objective" journalism.The dirty little secret of broadcast licensing is that there is no constitutionally permissible (as opposed to what the Ninth Circuit would permit, or what Sandra Day O'Connor would permit) standard for objectivity, fairness, or balance. The First Amendment doesn't say we are entitled to the truth, we are entitled to our own opinions - and to transmit our opinions as well as we can to others, subject to the fact that other people don't have to pay any attention to us. That isn't "fairness," that is a free-fire zone.
The FCC and its licensees have gotten away with a massive fraud in operating on the principle that whatever exists in free print journalism must be "fair" and can be the standard for "balanced" broadcast journalism. Proper reading of the First Amendment would forbid the government to decide prospectively whether journalism is fair - or balanced or objective - or not. Government licensing of radio transmission created broadcasting as we know it; without that licensing - without the censorship of the vast majority of us to make the few licensees' signals receivable over great distances - radio transmission wouldn't be "broad"casting, at least not reliably. And society worldwide is accustomed to the availability of broadcasting.
So the situation is that the government (FCC is part of the government) gives certain few of us what are essentially titles of nobility by certifying that they are broadcasting "in the public interest." And under the Constitution the government has no right to say what is objective (else would not eternal incumbency be "objective" in the eyes of congressmen?). Yet the broadcast journalist promotes the conceit that journalists are objective, and the government allows that propaganda to be broadcast as being in the public interest!
And it is provably propaganda. I can't distinguish a claim of "objectivity" from a claim of wisdom, can you? Is there any such thing as "unwise objectivity?" And even if there is, is that what the journalist means by the term? Yet since the ancient Greeks, philosophy has known that a claim of wisdom is extremely political - if I am wise and you disagree with me, you are automatically wrong. The claim that journalism is objective is sophistry, neither more nor less.
Dispose of the claim that journalism is objective, and broadcast journalism - and "reform" of political expenditures - is exposed as illegitimate. The Supreme Court should drastically curtail Congressional intrusion into politics. That would mean that George Soros would have unlimited ability to spend money on politics. But then, the money that runs the printing presses of all our newspapers is no cleaner than George Soros' money.
Journalism purports to be about "what is going on" - but journalism is actually about how important journalism is. That is where both the profit and the fun of journalism are.Journalism promotes itself by criticizing everyone who doesn't toady to it. It calls itself "objective," and it calls its toadies "liberals" or "progressives" - or "moderates" or "centrists."
There are very few actual conservatives in America; there is no ground for a conservative to stand on, really. Because the theme of America - the thing a conservative would conserve - is freedom. And freedom is not a truly conservative but a truly progressive value - it allows and fosters change. That is why "progressive" is a label journalists favor its toadies with, and "conservative" is the label journalists dismiss actual progressives with.
So-called "conservatives" are actually in favor of liberty, and are truly liberals in the lexicon of a century ago - and still today outside the US. Only journalists and cooperative intellectuals could have distorted the language in that way. Which is why the idea that journalist actually is objective is hilarious to me. What a joke that I avidly followed "the news" until I was thirty five years old! Now I mostly think of it as an advertisement for something I wouldn't buy.
"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena - Theodore Roosevelt