I (a layperson) don't really follow this. It sounds to me like "while the rules were in effect, they were rarely broken".
>an era when there were only 3 stations. But this situation is different.
Lots of station numbers, run by just a handful of owners:
http://www.neatorama.com/2008/07/07/who-owns-what-on-televis...
I worry it could do more harm than good nowadays if reinstated. Suddenly anti-vaxxers and people who think climate change is a hoax would have to be given more coverage, for example.
> I (a layperson) don't really follow this. It sounds to me like "while the rules were in effect, they were rarely broken".
It means that the FCC rarely enforced the fairness doctrine unless it was being blatantly abused.
> Lots of station numbers, run by just a handful of owners:
> http://www.neatorama.com/2008/07/07/who-owns-what-on-televis....
The fairness doctrine doesn't make sense any more because anybody with a phone can publish their opinions to a global audience. It made sense at the time because media was centrally controlled and very expensive to produce.
Sure the number of channels is higher, but the amount of information spread is not.
It was never applied to a sitation where a network required "must run" content. At best, the fairness doctrine would require at least some dissenting opinion on the issue. The Supreme Court, in upholding the fairness doctrine, said it should never be used to limit speech. That's what critics want to do here, punish Sinclair for running content.
Arguably, the fairness doctrine is no longer constitutional at all. The court's reasoning relied on there being limited channels. That is no longer true. Even on broadcast, there are 20 channels available. If democrats don't like Sinclair, they can go start their own network. When you consider all the other sorts of media available, its just not credible to argue that there is a legitmate concern that people cannot be both sides of an issue.