History of the Fairness Doctrine
The Fairness Doctrine has its
origins in In the Radio Act of 1927 when the United States Congress authorized
the Federal Radio Commission (the predecessor of the Federal Communications
Commission) “should only issue broadcast licenses when doing so serves the
public interest" (Matthews).
The Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) in 1949 released a report titled “In the Matter of Editorializing by
Broadcast Licensees,” where they stipulated that broadcasting licensees need to
provide a forum for “discussions of matters of public importance in their
broadcasts, and that they should do so in a fair manner.” The implication was
that broadcasters had to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas on a
particular topic “and include those people best suited to representing those
views in their programming” (Matthews).
Another consequence of the Fairness
Doctrine was that if a personal attack was made against anyone on a radio or
television broadcast, that individual had to be notified and given a chance to
respond. This is unlike the Equal Time rule, still in effect, which requires
broadcasters to provide equal time to “legally qualified” political candidates
(Matthews).
In 1969, the case Red Lion Broadcasting Co., Inc. v. Federal
Communications Commission came before the Supreme Court. Essentially,
broadcasters “challenge the fairness doctrine and its specific manifestations
in the personal attack and political editorial rules on conventional First
Amendment grounds, alleging that the rules abridge their freedom of speech and
press” ("Red Lion Broadcasting").
In this case, the Supreme Court
ruled unanimously that although broadcasters have First Amendment rights, the
airwaves are only leased to broadcasters and thus remain the property of the
United States Government. Despite this, in the aftermath of Red Lion laws were passed that weakened
the Fairness Doctrine.
Finally, the FCC repealed
the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and broadcasters no longer had to provide an
equal forum for competing viewpoints. If someone wanted to set up radio or TV
station that promoted only one viewpoint and restricted access to their
airwaves by people of opposing viewpoints, it was now permissible to do so.
This is where my short-lived
career in political talk radio began.
Talk Radio 1300 AM
In late December 1988, I was
hired as a board operator at WQBK 1300 AM. I just returned from Rochester where
my next door neighbor was serial killer Arthur Shawcross (see my post Arthur John Shawcross: The Monster on
Alexander Street). My initial pay was $3.35 an hour, which was
only minimum wage. It was a pitiful wage and adjusting for inflation is only
$6.60 in 2013, below the current minimum wage of $7.25. I literally could have
gotten paid more working at McDonalds. This was my first introduction to the
parsimony and occasional outright hostility of radio broadcasting management towards
their employees.
Radio “talent” accepted the low
wages in turn for the promise of career-building notoriety, and the management
could easily fill any vacancy from a long line of over-qualified college
graduates. Those who ended up behind the microphone were
seldom the most qualified, best educated, and intelligent candidates because
those people can get better paying jobs and have egos secure enough they don’t
need the dubious attention of a fickle audience.
At least that was the state of
affairs in radio broadcasting in Northeast in the 1980s and 1990s. I can’t address
conditions today, though I would not be surprised if things have not much changed.
Although the Fairness Doctrine
was abandoned in 1987, stations hadn’t changed formats all that much by 1988.
This is not surprising since most talk radio stations were likely locked into
contracts with various shows or on-air talent. A sign of the times, however, was
heralded on August 1, 1988, when Rush Limbaugh began his first nationwide show.
WQBK was the first station in our region to carry Limbaugh, but at the
time his was a lone conservative voice on a station whose programming was
filled with sports and advice shows, liberal talk shows, and even old-time
radio mysteries.
My shift began at 7 PM and
sometimes would stretch through 8 AM, depending on whether the overnight guy
dragged himself in. WQBK actually had a news staff of five at the time,
including a sports guy. By 1995, the station’s news programming had been
reduced to a single person shift rip and read operation and basically hasn’t
changed since.
It was a remarkably diverse
schedule. Both conservative and liberal talk shows had a platform, as well as
hard news, sports, advice, and even mystery!
A Seat at the Table
1988 to 1989 was the calm before
the storm. As stations began to realize the extent of their freedom following
the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, they began to shed the general
advice chat shows and smart news programming in exchange for monolithic blocks
of programming, such as all conservative talk or all sports, two genres WQBK
bounced back and forth on in the 1990s. With the increasing dependence on expensive
national programming, budget priorities changed. News staff was reduced at the
station from a crew of five to single-person shifts doing rip and read, which
means taking news from print, television, or wire services, and editing it for
your station’s use on air — a common practice throughout the industry now. WQBK's experience is exemplative of the
change many stations went through.
As 1989 wore on, I ingratiated
myself more into the daily operations of the station, mainly because I was the
only one willing to work at $3.35 an hour and do double shifts. When the
morning guy got sick one day, management put me behind the mike and things
quickly took off.
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| Restricted Radiotelephone Operator Permit. |
I was young and ambitious, and had an opinionated loud mouth, so I was perfect for the job. I antagonized our older listeners — conservatives, and liberals alike. The phone lines lit up like a Christmas tree with people ready to tell me off. Realizing the advantage of having a second person to banter with when the phone lines were down, the morning guy put me on air with him. Despite being both liberals, there was a generational gap that created a great deal of conflict. The results were comic in retrospect; sometimes he would kick me out of the studio, other times I would say something outrageously vulgar just to see how quick he was with the six-second kill switch.
A new board operator was hired to
pick up the evening shift. Scott Lonsberry was conservative, but we got along
quite well. We were two young men trying to make our way in radio so there was
a natural camaraderie. Despite that, Scott and I often argued political points
at the station, so one day over a beer, program director John Pendergast and
news reporter Matt Fluery suggested Scott and I produce our own morning show
segment in a point-counterpoint format. We leapt at the opportunity, but there
was a catch — while they would air the segment every day during the morning
drive, it could only run about two and a half minutes long.
Two and a half minutes was scarcely long
enough to introduce ourselves, so there was little we could discuss in
that time that would be enlightening. Since the loudest voices get the most
attention, regardless whether they actually have anything to say, we were
encouraged to “really go at it.” Scott and I rose to challenge and produced The Gauntlet, as when someone would
challenge someone to a duel by hitting them with their gauntlet. I don’t know
if anyone actually did that historically, but we saw it in the movies and it
struck us as the perfect title for our segments.
The catch was that Scott and I only had sixty
seconds each to make our point, so mainly all we could do was insult each
other. Below are five clips from the show done over the course of one week. I
present them here very reluctantly, since I have matured quite a bit in the
past 25 years and have moved beyond the histrionics you hear. Still, Scott and
I had a good repartee, which I still miss to this day. Matt Fluery's deep stentorian voice provides the introduction to each segment:
Drug legalization, pollution, immigration, social welfare, homosexuality, flag burning, War in the Middle East are all raised, but due to the limitations of time they are barely given a mention before moving on to the next talking point. I have to say I’m a little embarrassed by some of my exclamations, as well as my vocal performance, so I hope my good readers will allow that time and tide have produced a bit more saner and well-spoken individual than the callow young man you hear.
I forget how long we did the
spot, maybe six months. I quickly grew disenchanted with the whole business. I remember
the day that happened, or the evening I should say. During the Tiananmen Square
Massacre, June 3, 1989, I was working a double shift at the
station. We had no computers, and the World Wide Web was still a few years
away, so anxious for whatever news I could get, I waited until we went off
network at 11 pm, when we aired the CBS
Radio Mystery Theater, and began to surf through the channels of the
station’s giant satellite dish. I picked up a Radio Beijing report about the
massacre, which likely had been picked by another network and relayed back to America. In the report, an English-speaking
Chinese announcer provided the grisly details of the massacre, confirming the
horrible mass killing (you can read more about this report in my post The Lost Voice of Radio Beijing).
Radio Beijing is an official
state-run radio, and there was no doubt that this brave broadcaster, Yuan Neng,
was very literally putting his life on the line to report the truth. It took
several months for this to sink through my thick young skull, but I eventually
realized what a pointless exercise in narcissistic futility is talk radio. What
was The Gauntlet compared to Yuan
Neng’s brave report? All Scott and I were doing was to provide a marketing
platform for more ad sales — it had nothing to do with political discourse.
Despite the jump in my hourly wage to an all-time high of $3.75 an hour, I took
a job working in prison education, knowing I would be making a more significant
contribution to society (you can read more about this experience in my post The Criminal Underclass and Inmate Higher
Education).
I returned to radio a few times
afterwards as a second job, but with one foot planted firmly in education I
could never take radio news broadcasting seriously. Despite the great influence
on society and culture radio projects, its primary purpose is to serve as a
platform for advertising opportunities. Public radio is a little better, but
pressure is often exerted on its employees to support the station financially
or on their own time, which is a conflict of interest that would not be
tolerated in commercial radio.
How does all this relate to the
Fairness Doctrine? WQBK’s schedule in the late 1980s was a cornucopia of
programming: conservative and liberal political talk, hard news, sports, and advice
and chat shows. It forced both those behind the mike and those at home to sit
at the same table. Scott Lonsberry and I, despite our differences, had to work
with each other every day, and that gave us a respect for each other’s
point-of-view we would not have had were we working in all-liberal or all-conservative
radio stations.
Considering the great number of
outlets for one’s opinion today, everyone can find an opportunity to express
their point-of-view. True, conservatives dominate talk radio, but liberals
arguably have a plethora of outlets on TV and on the Internet, capturing an
audience generating the same aggregate numbers of listeners and watchers as
their conservative counterparts. Nevertheless, having so many options now has not
made any progress on any of the issues discussed in The Gauntlet segments. If anything, the nation is more divided
today. With so many voices shouting, all one can hear is noise.
What the Fairness Doctrine did
was to force everyone in the American family to sit down at the same table and
listen to each other. It’s much harder to hate someone when you have to break
bread with them — and that is the lesson I took away from working in talk radio.
Works Cited
Works Cited
Matthews, Dylan. “Everything You Need to Know About the
Fairness Doctrine in One Post.” Wonkblog, 23 Aug. 2011.
Web. 29. Jan. 2014. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/
blogs/wonkblog/post/everything-you-need-to-know-about-
the-fairness-doctrine-in-one-post/2011/08/23/
gIQAN8CXZJ_blog.html>.
Fairness Doctrine in One Post.” Wonkblog, 23 Aug. 2011.
Web. 29. Jan. 2014. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/
blogs/wonkblog/post/everything-you-need-to-know-about-
the-fairness-doctrine-in-one-post/2011/08/23/
gIQAN8CXZJ_blog.html>.
“Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC,
395 U.S. 367 (1969).” FindLaw.
Thomson Reuters, 2014. Web. 29 Jan. 2014. <http://
caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/
getcase.pl?court=US&vol=395&invol=367>.
Thomson Reuters, 2014. Web. 29 Jan. 2014. <http://
caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/
getcase.pl?court=US&vol=395&invol=367>.
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