Howard Kurtz Would Like the FCC to Just Quit it Already

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

23 February 14

oward Kurtz, who generally has so many interests in conflict that it's a wonder he doesn't get perpetual cramp in his 1099s, has landed at Fox News, where nobody gives much of a fk about ethics, or the truth, or anything else that gives Roger Ailes a pilonoidal cyst, and he doesn't have to worry about those sad dingleberries of credibility that still cling to his career.

I know that television stations are licensed in the public interest. It's fair for the FCC to examine how much news a station offers, as opposed to lucrative game shows and syndicated reruns. But the content of that news ought to be off-limits. The Fairness Doctrine, which once required TV and radio stations to offer equal time for opposing points of view, is no more, and good riddance (since it discouraged stations from taking a stand on much of anything). The Obama administration swears it's not coming back. How, then, to explain this incursion into the substance of journalism, which seems utterly at odds with the notion of a free and unfettered press?

Steve M does a good job of answering the "How, then, to explain..." part of Kurtz's quandary. (The answer: the FCC has a legal obligation to do this, and has done it for years without setting the flying monkeys aloft.) But that won't stop Kurtz and other, less responsible hysterics from howling their conjuring words until somebody in the saner precincts of the media -- my money is on my man Chuck Todd, who is still beside himself over the White House's authoritarian attitude toward releasing doggie pictures -- catapults it into Our National Dialogue. (Although Mediaite is already sadly ahead of the game.) But I'm most amused by Kurtz's invocation of The Fairness Doctrine, which is what wingnut talk-show hosts use to scare their children into going to bed on time. ("Get upstairs right now or The Fairness Doctrine will get you.")

Oh, look. It's already happening.

Paranoia is supposed to drive the news because freedom.

Almost eight years ago, in the course of beginning research into a book, I went to a national convention of talk-radio hosts and everybody there was talking about how terrified they were that the new Democratic majority in the House was going to bring back The Fairness Doctrine, and how they would all stand tall as part of The Resistance. (Bear in mind that Harry Reid already was on record as saying he had no intention of doing so.) There was even louder screeching about it in 2008, when the towering incompetence of the C-Plus Augustus administration gave the Democratic party nominal control (briefly) of the entire government. The president said (again) that he had no intention of bringing back The Fairness Doctrine. (In 2008, let's face it, it would have been pretty far down on the to-do list behind Clear Out The Rubble From The Entire Government.) And yet...

The questions the study asked, Republicans say, tread too close for comfort to the now-defunct Fairness Doctrine, a controversial federal policy that required radio and TV news to present opposing views of the news stories they covered. The policy was in effect from 1949 through 1987 and was formally wiped from the books in 2011...ouse Republicans shared similar concerns with Wheeler in December, calling the study a "Fairness Doctrine 2.0."..."The proposed design for the [Critical Information Needs] study shows a startling disregard for not only the bedrock constitutional principles that prevent government intrusion into the press and other news media, but also for the lessons learned by the Commission's experience with the Fairness Doctrine," Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee wrote.

And what, exactly, was "the Commission's experience with the Fairness Doctrine"? Well, having grown up as a news consumer in that benighted tyrannical age, what I remember was that there were a number of media companies, large and small, national and local, and that they actually competed with each other to present original programming from a pretty wide spectrum of political opinion. What I also remember was that you couldn't at that point drive from New York to Los Angeles while listening only to the same three or four nationally syndicated radio hosts, all of them wingnuts. And was political debate stifled? Well, I seem to recall the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement and the rise of the women's movement, and all of them taking place while the Fairness Doctrine was in place, and, again, my memory may be dimming, but I recall hearing vigorous debate about all of them -- especially that Vietnam War thing -- from every corner of the AM dial that wasn't playing the latest single from the Lemon Pipers. (Hell, I remember the late, great Jerry Williams in Boston putting former Bostonian Malcolm X on the air for two hours, which freaked out his local audience for years.) The Fairness Doctrine fell under Reagan, with the assistance of Antonin Scalia, which should be all you need to know about it.

In any case, the Fairness Doctrine has no constituency anywhere in government, and it certainly has none in the current monopolistic mass media culture -- Hey, anybody hear about that Comcast-Time Warner merger? -- which is a far more worrisome thing than whether or not the FCC is stopping by to make sure you're fulfilling your public obligation to the public airwaves, but which is something Howard Kurtz doesn't seem to worry about. A man never knows when he might need another gig.