The forces that drove this election’s media failure are likely to get worse

Re:The forces that drove this election’s media failure are l... by hga on Friday November 11, 2016 @01:59PM (#12933281)

Errr, I'm referring to this FCC policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine a rather brutal tactic by Truman that I've read Eisenhower used as well. Zapping it allowed for frankly "unbalanced", dishonest if you prefer, and inequitable radio shows like the icontic The Rush Limbaugh Show.

And thanks no doubt to a bit of Google AI, here he is on the topic, discussing how it was back in 1980 as well as more generally: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2014/02/20/anyone_remember...

As the Wikipedia article notes, this has nothing to do with the equal-time rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule about which I'm expressing no opinion.

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Re:The forces that drove this election’s media failure are l... by CWuestefeld on Friday November 11, 2016 @02:11PM (#12933392)

You're right that I had been conflating "equal time" with "fairness".

But it still seems that "fairness" is BS. First, I'm quite sure it can't pass Constitutional muster on the web. It was permitted back in the 60s predicated on the FCC managing a scarce resource (broadcast frequency spectrum). But for practical purposes, Internet bandwidth is unlimited, and it couldn't get away with this. Also, this seems little more than a nod. For any given issue, there's a kaleidoscope of differing ideas. It seems it shouldn't be too difficult to engineer a compliant broadcast that still manages to completely exclude specific undesired ideas, by including other views as compensating balance.

Rush Limbaugh is crap, and I won't watch him. But do you really want to live in a country where that's actually forbidden? I don't.

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