If you flip through the AM dial these days, you’ll find that half the stations or so are conservative talk radio. You won’t find a lot of reasoned arguments, or calm discussion there. There isn’t even all that much talk, in the sense of listeners calling in and getting responses, like talk radio was when I used to listen to it as a kid in L. A. Mostly it’s long monologues by the host, who usually makes Fox News seem relatively fair and balanced and Keith Olbermann, bless his heart, look calm.
Back in the old days, before around 1982, there was something called the Fairness Doctrine. There has been some talk of reviving the Fairness Doctrine. What it said, essentially, that if you want to be doled out part of the public airwaves by the FCC, then you have to present both sides of the issues. Have Rush on for a couple hours? Fine, you need Randi Rhodes, or some other liberal talker, on for a couple to balance it out. The Fairness Doctrine was held to be constitutional by a 9-0 decision of the Supreme Court, mostly because there are a limited number of slots for broadcast radio and TV, and giving one station the right to use some of that space necessarily precludes another. Conservative Talk Radio *hates* the Fairness Doctrine.
There’s a downside to going that route, however. The biggest is that ultimately, the government has to make decisions about what balances what. In order to know whether Randi and Rush balance each other, you have to have a preconceived notion that the “center” is between them. Furthermore, Randi and Rush aren’t free to change their points of view anymore, under the Fairness Doctrine – they both have to occupy their respective liberal and conservative slots or the radio station is in violation. On the whole, it would be best not to re-enact the Fairness Doctrine.
There is another rule change made by the FCC, however, that is worth revisiting. It used to be that the FCC limited companies from controlling multiple radio stations in an area, or from controlling too many radio stations in total; now, those restrictions are much looser. There is a danger to freedom of speech if a few partisans end up controlling most of the airwaves, and putting stricter limits back on will help balance radio a little. Conservative talk, however, has a dominant position on the radio, and that probably won’t change.
In the long run, it won’t matter. HD Radio and the like mean that there will be many more stations on the radio. Cable and Satellite do the same for television. On Cable, liberal hosts Olbermann and Rachel Maddow are drawing about as many viewers as the more established Fox News right wingers Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, who are on during the same time slot. Progressives are doing fine at getting eyeballs in the blogosphere. Radio is the trailing edge of communication, and the leading edge is open and free – and fertile ground for the left.
In fact, the left does best in precisely those areas which require your attention – to read or watch. Essentially, conservatives are winning the day only when people are trying to drive at the same time. That doesn’t mean that they are unimportant – the hate that gets spewed out still drives people to the polls, and gets them to shout out epithets at rallies. But on the whole, the future of the free marketplace of ideas is bright. We have the advantage that, as Stephen Colbert once said, “Reality has a well known liberal bias.”
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3 comments:
I hadn't realized how averse right-wingers were to dissent, which is why I was surprised and amused by this passage from James Dobson's wingnut-porn, a cautionary letter written from Oct. 2012:
By the summer of 2009, the five-member FCC was controlled by Democratic appointees including a chairman appointed by President Obama. The "Fairness Doctrine" became a topic of FCC consideration following pressure from Democratic congressional leaders who initially did not have sufficient votes to pass the measure. The FCC quickly implemented the "Fairness Doctrine," which requires that radio stations provide "equal time" for alternative views on political or policy issues.
As a result, all radio stations have to provide equal time to contrasting views for every political or policy-related program they broadcast by talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Dennis Prager, Janet Parshall, Michael Medved and Hugh Hewitt, and broadcasters like Dr. James Dobson. Every conservative talk show is followed by an instant rebuttal to the program by a liberal "watchdog" group. Many listeners gave up in frustration, advertising (and donation) revenues dropped dramatically, and nearly all conservative stations have gone out of business or switched to alternative formats such as country or gospel or other music. Conservative talk radio, for all intents and purposes, was shut down by the end of 2010.
It's funny to think of conservative listeners so disgusted by the prospect of a three-hour Jeaneane Garofalo-thon following the Rush Limbaugh show, that they choose to turn the radio off entirely, rather than switch to another channel.
Perhaps this represents one of two approaches to dealing with foreign ideas: if you want to raise your children with your values, you can either expose them to foreign ideas and show why yours are better (kind of like vaccination), or try to insulate them from foreign ideas (insulation). I have no doubt that one of the factors behind the conservative homeschooling movement and injunctions to Jehovah's Witnesses not to be "worldly" is to insulate the group from corrupting influences.
Of course, as the townspeople in Mark Twain's "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" discovered, if you insulate yourself completely from corruption, you may find yourself untrained to deal with it if your defenses crack. So count me, to no one's surprise, in the "inoculation" camp.
In addition, he said in a hamfisted attempt to shove this comment back into the general area of the original thread, in today's era of ever-increasing communication, trying to insulate yourself or your children is increasingly difficult. And yes, the fairness doctrine will soon become obsolete, as technologies like WiMax allow us to receive any Internet radio station in the world from our cars.
Long live Babel!
The innoculation strategy makes more sense, but it means you have to confront your own fear of the other ideas first, in order to confront them together with your children.
What drives the insulation strategy usually is not, I suspect, a real belief that it works better, but a sort of cowardice, the same thing that drives parents to not want to have the "sex talk."
Of course. Though as with so many things, there's a spectrum. While you might not go out of your way to visit a Hindu temple with your son, you also won't avoid taking the Metro downtown for fear that he might see someone wearing a sari or a turban and start asking questions.
Perhaps "inoculation" is somewhat incorrect, since it implies actively seeking out otherness and exposing your child to it. But as a rule, the world already contains plenty of otherness without you needing to seek it out.
And the denser the population in your neighborhood, the harder it is to maintain the isolation strategy is harder and harder to maintain.
But really, the approach I'm advocating is "raise your children to be able to deal with the world as it is". I don't expect this to be a controversial statement.
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