Commentary: It’s time to revive Fairness Doctrine and expand it – Crain’s Detroit Business

In a commencement address delivered at Michigan Stadium in 2010, President Barack Obama famously prescribed a cure for the enmity ailing our politics.

"If you're someone who only reads the editorial page of The New York Times, try glancing at the page of The Wall Street Journal once in a while," he exhorted. "If you're a fan of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, try reading a few columns of the Huffington Post website."

The president's sage advice went unheeded. As evidenced by voters' schizophrenically partisan opinions about President Joe Biden's legitimacy, too many of us now huddle in toxic media bubbles feedback loops confirming our political biases.

Reinstating and modernizing the time-tested Fairness Doctrine, a policy dating back to 1929 that for nearly six decades required over-the-air broadcasters to present both sides of public issues, would help burst those bubbles.

Wrapping themselves in the First Amendment, partisans and broadcasting conglomerates would fight any effort to resuscitate the Fairness Doctrine.

But freedoms are not absolute. In 1969, the Supreme Court held in Red Lion that the Fairness Doctrine withstands legal scrutiny: The First Amendment allows the government to require a broadcast licensee "to present those views and voices which are representative of his community."

Indeed, the Supreme Court ruled the Fairness Doctrine furthers the purpose of the First Amendment by creating "an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail."

A Fairness Doctrine equal to the task of meeting today's challenges, including ubiquitous social networks and 24/7 cable news, would have to be carefully crafted to pass constitutional muster. But a regulatory and enforcement scheme one that balances myriad competing interests could be devised.

Ideological regulators at the Federal Communications Commission gutted the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 by selling a fiction: An increase in cable channels eliminated any need for government to shape editorial content.

The argument was not evidence-based. Fairness Doctrine opponents never established a correlation between an increase in broadcast outlets and voters' exposure to contrasting viewpoints.

History has disproven assumptions undergirding arguments hyped by libertarians who advocated the Fairness Doctrine's demise: Competition for public trust would "force" broadcasters to cover many sides of issues; the doctrine causes outlets to remain silent on controversial issues; in a bustling media marketplace, voters would listen to each other and change their minds.

These predictions were as misguided as futurists who prophesied that, like George Jetson, we'd now be commuting in flying cars.

Sean Hannity's business model doesn't give airtime to Nancy Pelosi. "Morning Joe" MSNBC producers make profits by playing to progressive partisans.

We know now broadcasters will never voluntarily walk away from the billions of dollars annually generated by wall-to-wall "politainment."

Rather than meaningfully engage each other, we rarely, if ever, emerge from partisan corners a fact reflected by our news consumption. Republicans overwhelmingly get their political and election news from Fox News, a recent Pew Charitable Trust poll found. One-fifth of Democrats and Republicans receive their news only from sources catering to like-minded audiences.

The electronic iron curtain dividing our media landscape explains why former President Donald Trump's approval ratings stayed locked in place throughout his four tumultuous years in office, why he maintains an iron grip on Republicans today, and why liberals often unfairly paint his supporters with the broadest of brushes, peremptorily dismissing them as morally irredeemable.

We don't have to live in a world in which millions of eyeballs are glued to hyper-partisan TV. Grassroots groups across the political spectrum (from the ACLU to the NRA) supported the Fairness Doctrine. It allowed them to register complaints about editorial imbalance and demand "reasonable opportunity for presentation of opposing points of view."

The Fairness Doctrine worked. It resulted in, for example, airtime being granted to respond to the political harangues of a fiery radio evangelist and the revocation of a broadcast license belonging to another radio station whose programming was "highly racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro and anti-Roman Catholic."

Enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine generated public trust in the media, which in recent years has plummeted to all-time lows, according to Gallup.

As importantly, the Fairness Doctrine cultivated an ethos of civic responsibility, promoted allegiance to journalistic codes of ethics, and stood as a beacon of objectivity.

Imagine the sunnier reality a wisely implemented, clearly defined Fairness Doctrine would help usher in. News outlets would be incentivized to broadcast truly "fair and balanced" news coverage. Partisan screeds more likely would be answered with counterstatements of fact.

The media, with its cacophonous echo chambers, are self-evidently in dire need of reform. It's time to revive the Fairness Doctrine and even expand it so it applies to cable TV's demagogic talking heads.

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Commentary: It's time to revive Fairness Doctrine and expand it - Crain's Detroit Business