Les Reactionaires are all in a lather about the fairness doctrine. Pelosi says she wants to see it come back. Obama has no interest in it. I don't really care one way or the other, since it's a silly idea that implies either a) framing political discourse within the confined space of "acceptable" or "responsible" opinion, so that any issue is limited to the Republican and Democratic points of view, (Which do you like? Coke or Pepsi? Rock or country?) or b) instituting real, actual fairness, which would mean everybody would get air time in which to bark, including the Vegetarian Party, the Prohibition Party, and the We're-all-going-to-be-kidnapped-by aliens-invading-earth-in-UFO's Party.
The fairness doctrine requires that everyone get equal time. So if a broadcast station gives half an hour to the party that believes regulation of the banking industry is a socialist ploy, they would be required in the interest of fairness to give half an hour to a spokesperson for the party that believes private property should be abolished and all the means of production given to the workers.
If NPR has a ten-minute interview with an anthropological geneticist who explains that Darwin's theory is proved beyond any doubt not by the fossil record, but by the small number of differences between the DNA sequence of humans and that of chimpanzees (the number is one), they also have to give ten minutes to Reverend Bob of the Born Again and Don't You Forget It Baptist Church so he can counter with the proposition that the earth is 6,000 years old, that Noah had dinosaurs on the ark, and that there's no such thing as DNA anyhow. It's only fair.
If we can't be fair and treat everybody equally, what good are we?
The fairness doctrine is kind of like equality under the law. Since everybody is equal under the law, it means that Donald Trump or Warren Buffet will be arrested if they sleep under a bridge, steal bread, or urinate in public, just the same way as homeless people are arrested for those things.
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2 comments:
Thought-provoking post.
Dave please accept a tangential thought that i just spent quite a while composing:
Getting to an advanced future is almost at a crawl because of a genetic predisposition to believe. It causes humans to waste most of their collective brain power on doctrine. It could be as much as 95% wasted.
The most damaging doctrine that causes widespread and cumulatively extreme social injury is the religion involving the idea of winner-take-all. It rampages through civilization, consuming resources like they are unlimited. The most evil manifestation of this doctrine in action is war. But, it also is behind a myriad of other social maladies ranging from bad social harms like murder to seemingly innocuous ones like sports competition. Sports competition injures self-worth of losers while bloating that of winners. It also perpetuates the survival of the fittest attitude, where fitness is determined by arbitrary and likely shortsighted criteria.
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