As Rush Limbaugh and his estimated 20 million daily listeners celebrate the talk radio titan’s 20th anniversary on the air, Democratic leaders in Congress are moving to turn his mike off.
Their weapon is restoration of the so-called Fairness Doctrine. Even folks who would rather have a root canal than listen to Rush’s daily pronouncements should hope they don’t succeed. If they do bring back this bureaucratic relic from the days of Harry Truman, it won’t be just Rush’s voice that will be muted, it will be free and open political debate in general that will suffer.
The Fairness Doctrine, established by the Federal Communications Commission in 1949, requires TV and radio stations that broadcast over the public airwaves to devote equal time to competing points of view. While that sounds like a good idea in theory, it severely curtails broadcasters’ First Amendment rights when put into practice. That’s why it was repealed by President Ronald Reagan.
Repeal cleared the way for an explosion in talk radio that vastly increased the ability of all citizens to hear alternative viewpoints to those that dominate the mainstream media. Democrats now want to resurrect the Fairness Doctrine’s mummified remains because they like having compliant Washington bureaucrats deciding what the rest of us hear on the nation’s airwaves.
Doubters should read a little history, starting with “The Good Guys, the Bad Guys and the Fairness Doctrine,” especially its account of the landmark 1969 U.S. Supreme Court case Red Lion Broadcasting v. Federal Communications Commission, by former CBS News President Fred W. Friendly. The case was sparked when the Rev. John Norris, owner of tiny Christian radio station WGCB in Red Lion, Pa., was forced to offer free air time to Fred J. Cook, author of “Goldwater: Fanatic of the Right” — 50,000 copies of which were distributed by the Democratic National Committee.
The FCC won the case, but even Arthur Larsen, chairman of the National Council for Civic Responsibility, a DNC front group, later admitted that “we decided to use the Fairness Doctrine [during the 1964 election between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater] to harass the extreme right. In the light of Watergate, it was wrong. We felt the ends justified the means.”
Therein lies the inescapable problem with the Fairness Doctrine — no government official is ever qualified to decide what is “fair” opinion and what isn’t. A thousand flowers of political opinion bloomed after Reagan repealed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. Bring it back now, and they’ll wither and die.
