{"id":3085,"date":"2008-08-18T12:23:26","date_gmt":"2008-08-18T17:23:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3085"},"modified":"2012-01-06T14:13:36","modified_gmt":"2012-01-06T20:13:36","slug":"fairness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3085","title":{"rendered":"Fairness"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a post last Friday<\/a> about the “Fairness” Doctrine, a commenter quipped:<\/p>\n

Imagine the outcry when the wacko Phelps family of Kansas gets to have anti-gay programs on all of the stations that have pro-gay rights material.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Heh. Funny – but as luck would have it, that\u2019s not how the “Fairness” doctrine works.<\/p>\n

Here’s how I remember it working in the first eight <\/em>years of my radio “career”, from 1979 to 1987, when both the Doctrine and my job at KSTP were repealed.<\/p>\n

The \u201cFairness\u201d Doctrine didn\u2019t assign ideological quotas to station\u2019s programming; there was no bureaucrat in the Minneapolis office poring over stations’ schedules, coloring in liberal shows in crimson and conservative shows in blue, comparing swatches, and issuing orders to reprogram dayparts.<\/p>\n

What the “Fairness” doctrine did was give the public – or parts of the public that were up in arms about a station’s presentation of one or several issues – legal and procedural grounds to challenge a station\u2019s license renewal.<\/p>\n

When stations renew their licenses (and I forget what the time period is for that; it happens every several years; I want to say “seven”, but don’t bet your mortgage on that), the FCC takes complaints from the public about the station\u2019s \u201cpublic service\u201d. During the period of the \u201cFairness\u201d Doctrine, that meant that people could write the FCC and complain that the station\u2019s politics didn\u2019t grant equal time to one view or another. Investigating these complaints and adjudicating them was part of the license renewal process was part of getting the license renewed; the FCC could assign corrective actions or (in theory; don\u2019t know if it ever happend) deny renewal.<\/p>\n

For most radio stations, the “programming” was mostly music – a matter of taste, certainly, but not a matter of public policy interest; writing to the FCC to demand a country station switch to alt-rock (record stores in Minnepolis in the mid ’80s frequently had “petitions” sitting around from groups that wanted the FCC to “serve the public” by forcing, say, K102 or KOOL108 or some other FM frequency to play alternative rock) would pretty much fall on deaf ears. But stations did <\/em>(and to an extent, still do) have to show some effort to serve the public interest; these efforts had\/have to be documented to the FCC at license renewal time. For a music station – like the first four I worked at – it was a matter of filing logs showing that the station had played<\/p>\n