I wonder why the FCC's fairness doctrine is rarely brought up in articles like this. They used to enforce certain standards whereby news being broadcast on the public airwaves had to be both relevant to the public interest, and presented without overt bias. Then, under Reagan, they just stopped doing that, and to me that's when an already imperfect news industry started to really go off the rails.
It sounds hopelessly naive in 2021, when suggesting that the press can even attempt to be objective marks you as a rube. Yet it seems like enforcing some expectation of fairness would be an improvement over having none at all. It may not be possible to actually be objective, but in the same way that we can't stop people from killing or robbing each other, we still insist on asking them very nicely not to, and holding them to account when we catch them at it. Most would say it's better to have some pretense of civilization than to just give up trying: why have we given up trying?
I'd even suggest that removing the standard of fairness allowed a different set of ethics to fill the vacuum: good journalism is attention-grabbing and serves the ideological base that forms your revenue stream. You could see this happening with the cable news explosion in the 80s, but it went supernova with the internet, and the changing economics of the post-Facebook era.
Clearly, the FCC can't control the global internet, and broadcast television and radio is not much of a factor anymore. So, any modern equivalent to the fairness doctrine would likely have to come from aggregators like Facebook, Google, Reddit, etc., which may seem impossible because it's at odds with their business model. But, I'm hopeful because there is a history of industries adopting their own standards before they have more restrictive ones imposed on them by regulation.
I would be in favor of reclaiming some words like "News" with regulatory controls. Just like the FDA doesn't allow someone to label their product as "Organic" without meeting certain standards, I would argue that we should enforce some basic standards in order to label yourself as "News" or "Media Organization." It would be a slippery slope to navigate with the first amendment and the internet but there is a large group of citizens that will believe anything if it was on TV and came from the "News."
This seems like the best approach. No doubt people will continue to kick and scream about their first amendment rights being infringed upon but as long as they're not actually banned from talking it seems perfectly constitutional.
It sounds hopelessly naive in 2021, when suggesting that the press can even attempt to be objective marks you as a rube. Yet it seems like enforcing some expectation of fairness would be an improvement over having none at all. It may not be possible to actually be objective, but in the same way that we can't stop people from killing or robbing each other, we still insist on asking them very nicely not to, and holding them to account when we catch them at it. Most would say it's better to have some pretense of civilization than to just give up trying: why have we given up trying?
I'd even suggest that removing the standard of fairness allowed a different set of ethics to fill the vacuum: good journalism is attention-grabbing and serves the ideological base that forms your revenue stream. You could see this happening with the cable news explosion in the 80s, but it went supernova with the internet, and the changing economics of the post-Facebook era.
Clearly, the FCC can't control the global internet, and broadcast television and radio is not much of a factor anymore. So, any modern equivalent to the fairness doctrine would likely have to come from aggregators like Facebook, Google, Reddit, etc., which may seem impossible because it's at odds with their business model. But, I'm hopeful because there is a history of industries adopting their own standards before they have more restrictive ones imposed on them by regulation.