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Multiple far-left media zealots have in recent days called for Fox News and other conservative outlets to be permanently censored and silenced.
One of these zealots, Washington Post columnist and CNN analyst Max Boot, went so far as to equate Fox News with “foreign terrorist groups” and demand that President Joe Biden revive the now-defunct fairness doctrine to accomplish the job.
“[T]he United Kingdom doesn’t have its own version of Fox News, because it has a government regulator that metes out hefty fines to broadcasters that violate minimal standards of impartiality and accuracy. The United States hasn’t had that since the Federal Communications Commission stopped enforcing the ‘fairness’ doctrine in the 1980s. As president, Biden needs to reinvigorate the FCC.”
Another of the zealots, radically anti-freedom, anti-liberty zealot Anand Giridharadas of MSNBC, challenged the idea that networks like Fox should even be allowed to exist and called a new, “broader” Fairness Doctrine to be created.
Look:
It’s time for this question to be front and center: Should Fox News be allowed to exist? Brain-mashing as a business model shouldn’t be legal.
— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) January 22, 2021
I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t understand why you’re not allowed to manufacture bucatini that doesn’t have a certain threshold of iron in it but you can broadcast brain-mashing falsehoods and goad people toward terrorism.
— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) January 22, 2021
If the Fairness Doctrine, applying to broadcast, was constitutional, why would a new Fairness Doctrine, applying more broadly, be a violation of that same Constitution?
— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) January 22, 2021
The fairness doctrine was a Federal Communications Commission policy that had ostensibly been designed to force broadcasters to present information in a fair and balanced manner by featuring both sides of every issue.
Except that rarely happened. Instead, the liberal narrative dominated the airways. Thus, not until the Reagan administration’s elimination of the policy in 1987 was conservative media really able to emerge on the scene and begin telling its side of the story.
Regardless, according to National Review senior political correspondent Jim Geraghty, the idea of reviving the fairness doctrine makes no sense.
For one, he wrote this week, the fairness doctrine only applied to broadcast networks, not cable networks like Fox.
For another, the doctrine was jettisoned in 1987 specifically because the FCC had determined that it “was stifling discussion of current events instead of facilitating it.” And given the current climate, less meaningful discussion is the last thing Americans need.
Likewise, the notion of creating a new “broader” fairness doctrine targeting not only speech on cable but speech on the Internet as well would meanwhile be a clear violation of the 1949 court decision Terminiello v. City of Chicago.
In the decision, Justice William Douglas decreed that “freedom of speech, though not absolute … is nevertheless protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest.”
“There is no room under our Constitution for a more restrictive view. For the alternative would lead to standardization of ideas either by legislatures, courts, or dominant political or community groups.”
Of course, the “standardization of ideas” is exactly what leftists like Boot and Giridharadas seek, in that they want to return to a media environment where only the leftist worldview of society and news is ever purveyed.
As once noted by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, “Reinstating the Fairness Doctrine would essentially turn talk radio into PBS, restoring a virtual monopoly to the major liberal media.”
Indeed.
Speaking on this same issue back in 2018, conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh imagined the thoughts that go through the minds of leftists like Boot and Giridharadas.
“If we had Walter Cronkite back, there wouldn’t be Rush Limbaugh; there wouldn’t be anybody to criticize us. There wouldn’t be Fox News out there criticizing us,” he said.
He then added in his own voice, “This is what they want, folks. They’re telegraphing what they’re gonna do if they win. They’re setting up a one-party everything. Good-bye, individual liberty and freedom on everything. This is drastic!”
The good news is that the chances of this happening are extremely low thanks to the judicial picks of President Donald Trump, who was responsible for installing conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
“[T]his current Supreme Court is very, very, very likely to find FCC restrictions on what Fox News Channel or any other news channel says to be a blatant and galling violation of the First Amendment,” Geraghty noted in his column.
Indeed.
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V. Saxena is a staff writer for BizPac Review with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University.
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