Fairness doctrine

Based on Wikipedia: Fairness doctrine

In 1987, four unelected officials gathered in a government building in Washington and, by unanimous vote, changed the course of American political discourse forever. They abolished a rule that had governed American broadcasting for nearly four decades—a rule that required radio and television stations to present both sides of controversial issues. What followed was an explosion of one-sided political commentary that would reshape how Americans argue about politics.

The rule they killed was called the Fairness Doctrine.

The Problem It Was Meant to Solve

To understand why this rule ever existed, you need to understand something fundamental about radio and television in the twentieth century: the airwaves were scarce.

Unlike newspapers, which anyone could theoretically start with enough money and a printing press, radio and television stations required something that physically could not be multiplied: a slice of the electromagnetic spectrum. Only so many stations could broadcast in any given city before their signals started interfering with each other. The federal government, through the Federal Communications Commission (known universally as the FCC), decided who got to use these limited frequencies.

This created an uncomfortable situation for a democracy that prized free speech. If the government was going to grant exclusive licenses to broadcast over public airwaves—effectively giving a megaphone to some citizens while denying it to others—shouldn't there be some obligation to serve the public interest?

The FCC thought so.

How the Doctrine Actually Worked

The Fairness Doctrine, formalized in 1949, had two basic requirements for anyone holding a broadcast license.

First, stations had to devote at least some of their programming to controversial issues of public importance. They couldn't simply fill the airwaves with entertainment and advertisements while ignoring the debates that mattered to their communities.

Second—and this was the crucial part—when stations did cover these controversies, they had to present contrasting viewpoints. Not necessarily equal time for every perspective, but a genuine effort to let audiences hear more than one side of an argument.

Stations had considerable flexibility in how they met this second requirement. They could present opposing views through news coverage, public affairs programs, or editorials. The doctrine didn't demand that every program be balanced, only that the station's overall programming offer viewers and listeners a reasonably complete picture of important debates.

This is worth emphasizing because the Fairness Doctrine is often confused with a different rule called the Equal Time Rule, which still exists today. The Equal Time Rule is much narrower—it applies only to political candidates and requires stations that give airtime to one candidate to offer equivalent time to opponents. The Fairness Doctrine was broader, covering all controversial issues, not just elections.

The Strange Birth of the Rule

The Fairness Doctrine emerged from a peculiar conflict in 1930s Boston.

John Shepard III owned radio stations WAAB and WNAC, and he wasn't shy about using them to attack politicians he disliked. His stations broadcast editorials savaging local and federal officials, giving voice to Shepard's personal political views without any pretense of balance.

A former employee named Lawrence Flynn decided to fight back. He filed complaints with the FCC, arguing that Shepard was abusing the public airwaves for private vendettas. Flynn even created his own company, Mayflower Broadcasting, and asked the FCC to transfer Shepard's license to him.

The FCC refused to give Flynn the license, but Shepard's behavior clearly troubled the commissioners. In 1941, they issued what became known as the Mayflower Decision, declaring that radio stations had to remain neutral on political matters. No editorials. No taking sides. Complete neutrality.

This proved too extreme. By 1949, the FCC reconsidered. Broadcasters, they decided, should be allowed to editorialize—but only if they also presented opposing viewpoints. The Fairness Doctrine was born.

A Tool for Presidents

Here's where the story takes a darker turn. While the Fairness Doctrine was sold as a way to inform the public, it became something else in the hands of ambitious politicians: a weapon against their enemies.

The Kennedy administration figured this out quickly. Bill Ruder, who served as Assistant Secretary of Commerce under President Kennedy, later admitted the strategy openly: "Our massive strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue."

Think about what that means. The government wasn't using the doctrine to ensure balanced coverage. It was using the threat of fairness complaints to financially exhaust stations that aired conservative viewpoints.

A memo from Kennedy's FCC staffer Martin Firestone to the Democratic National Committee laid out the tactic explicitly. Many small rural radio stations carried conservative programming because it brought in advertising money. If Democrats could force these stations to provide free airtime for rebuttals every time they aired conservative content, the economics would flip. The programs would become "bothersome and burdensome," and stations would drop them.

It worked. The Johnson and Nixon administrations employed similar tactics. The Fairness Doctrine, designed to expose Americans to diverse viewpoints, was being used to silence viewpoints the party in power found inconvenient.

The Supreme Court Weighs In

In 1969, the Supreme Court confronted the Fairness Doctrine directly in a case called Red Lion Broadcasting Company versus FCC.

The case began when a conservative radio host named Billy James Hargis attacked a journalist named Fred Cook on his daily program. Cook had written a book critical of Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, and Hargis wasn't gentle in his assessment. Cook demanded free airtime to respond. The radio station refused. The case eventually reached the highest court in the land.

The Court ruled 8-0 in favor of the FCC and the Fairness Doctrine.

Justice Byron White, writing for the Court, offered a striking justification. A broadcast license, he explained, doesn't give anyone a constitutional right to monopolize a radio frequency. The airwaves belong to the public. Broadcasters are merely trustees.

It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.

The First Amendment, the Court reasoned, wasn't just about protecting the speech of those who owned megaphones. It was about ensuring that citizens had access to the information they needed for self-governance. If station owners could broadcast only viewpoints they personally agreed with, the public would be poorly served.

But the Court added an important caveat: if the Fairness Doctrine ever proved to actually reduce speech rather than expand it, the constitutional calculation might change.

The Newspaper Exception

Five years later, the Supreme Court considered a seemingly similar case—but reached the opposite conclusion.

A Florida law required newspapers to give political candidates free space to reply to critical editorials. The Miami Herald challenged the law, and in a unanimous decision, the Court struck it down.

Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote that a "government-enforced right of access inescapably dampens the vigor and limits the variety of public debate."

How could the same Court that upheld the Fairness Doctrine for broadcasters forbid similar requirements for newspapers?

The answer came down to scarcity. Anyone with enough money could start a newspaper—there was no physical limit on how many papers could exist. But only a finite number of radio and television stations could operate in any market. The government had to choose who got broadcast licenses, which made broadcasting fundamentally different from print.

This distinction would become increasingly difficult to maintain.

The World Changes

By the 1980s, the media landscape looked nothing like it had in 1949.

Cable television was spreading across America, offering dozens of channels where once there had been three or four. Satellite technology promised even more options. The scarcity rationale—the very foundation of the Fairness Doctrine—was crumbling.

Meanwhile, evidence mounted that the doctrine wasn't working as intended. Broadcasters, afraid of triggering fairness complaints and the legal costs that came with them, increasingly avoided controversial topics altogether. The rule meant to ensure diverse viewpoints was actually reducing the range of issues discussed on the air.

In 1985, the FCC—now led by Mark Fowler, a Reagan appointee who had worked on Reagan's presidential campaigns—released a report arguing that the Fairness Doctrine harmed the public interest and likely violated the First Amendment. The Commission stopped short of abolishing the rule, unsure whether Congress had made it mandatory in 1959 amendments to communications law.

The End

Two court decisions in 1986 and 1987 clarified the legal situation. Judges Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia—both future Supreme Court nominees—ruled that the FCC had authority over the Fairness Doctrine but was not required to enforce it. A separate panel confirmed that Congress had never actually mandated the doctrine.

The FCC had permission to let it die.

On August 4, 1987, they did exactly that. By a vote of 4-0, the Commission abolished the Fairness Doctrine in a case called Syracuse Peace Council.

Chairman Dennis Patrick, explaining the decision, said the Commission sought "to extend to the electronic press the same First Amendment guarantees that the print media have enjoyed since our country's inception."

The FCC concluded that the doctrine had become the opposite of what it was supposed to be:

The intrusion by government into the content of programming occasioned by the enforcement of [the fairness doctrine] restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters ... [and] actually inhibits the presentation of controversial issues of public importance to the detriment of the public and the degradation of the editorial prerogative of broadcast journalists.

A federal appeals court upheld the decision in 1989, though it explicitly declined to rule on whether the doctrine was unconstitutional.

What Came After

Within a year of the Fairness Doctrine's demise, Rush Limbaugh launched his nationally syndicated radio show. It was unabashedly conservative, confrontational, and made no pretense of presenting opposing viewpoints. It was also enormously popular, attracting millions of listeners and spawning countless imitators.

Liberals would later develop their own partisan media ecosystem—MSNBC, progressive podcasts, online publications—though talk radio remained predominantly conservative territory.

Some researchers have linked the Fairness Doctrine's end to the increasing polarization of American politics. Without any requirement to expose audiences to opposing viewpoints, media outlets discovered they could build loyal followings by telling people exactly what they wanted to hear. Outrage proved profitable.

Others argue the doctrine's abolition simply acknowledged reality. In a world of cable news, satellite radio, and eventually the internet, the idea that government needed to ensure diverse viewpoints on a handful of broadcast channels seemed quaint. Anyone could find any viewpoint they wanted. The problem wasn't scarcity of speech—it was the opposite.

The Zombie That Won't Die

Despite being dead for nearly four decades, the Fairness Doctrine keeps coming up in American political debate.

Periodically, politicians—usually Democrats frustrated with conservative talk radio—float proposals to restore it. These efforts have gone nowhere. In 2011, the FCC formally removed the doctrine's implementing regulations from the Federal Register, a bureaucratic burial that made revival slightly harder.

The arguments against restoration are substantial. The scarcity rationale has evaporated entirely—Americans now have access to virtually unlimited media channels. The First Amendment concerns that the Supreme Court once waved away have only grown stronger as courts have expanded speech protections. And the history of political abuse remains troubling: any rule that lets the party in power pressure critical media outlets is ripe for misuse.

Yet the underlying problem the Fairness Doctrine was meant to address hasn't gone away. Americans increasingly consume news that confirms their existing beliefs while rarely encountering serious engagement with opposing viewpoints. Partisan media has proven fantastically effective at monetizing outrage. The shared understanding of basic facts that democracy requires seems to be fracturing.

The Fairness Doctrine wasn't a good solution to this problem. Its enforcement was arbitrary, its application was politically motivated, and its chilling effect on controversial speech was real. But the problem it identified—the danger of media ecosystems that feed citizens only what they want to hear—has only grown more acute.

We got rid of the Fairness Doctrine because it didn't work. We still haven't found anything that does.