THE FAIRNESS DOCTRINE FOUNDERED ON GILLIGAN'S ISLAND.

Minnow set sail for a three-hour tour for a reason.

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip.

The tale has become almost as long as The Odyssey, and it continues after the jump. 

(I was tempted to say "after a word from our sponsor.")

Rush Limbaugh's half-century career in radio began as a 16-year-old at a small station in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in 1967. (If you just muttered to yourself, "Where?" then you've already got a good sense of how unlikely Rush's rise to prominence was.) Notably, one of Limbaugh's first jobs in radio was in community ascertainment, which meant canvassing local businesses, churches, and interest groups to ask about the kinds of content they wanted to hear on the airwaves. The programs produced because of these expeditions were then parked on the least desirable time slots of the week, like Sunday morning.

Station owners were not, after all, truly owners; they were merely borrowers, temporarily using a slice of the electromagnetic spectrum via a license granted to them by the federal government. That license came with strings attached.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) required community canvassing as part of its requirement that stations operate in the "public interest, convenience, or necessity." License holders couldn't just air whatever content they wanted (or what they thought their listeners wanted). No, they had a vague responsibility to air programming that their listeners needed, and to do so whether or not listeners actually, well, listened.

It came to that, dear reader, long before Rush Limbaugh was born, when the Wise Experts decided that the broadcast spectrum had to be managed the same way the telephone monopoly and the railroad cartels were, which is to say, to generate rents and then dissipate them.  It didn't work out so badly for Lyndon Johnson, for instance, to have an asset created literally out of thin air (well, air with some amplitude modulation going through it), but I digress.

It's possible, for instance, that the Cape Girardeau station had to cut its power after sunset, as the initial carving up of the broadcast spectrum envisioned a few very powerful stations that could be heard over much of the country.  But the broadcasting technology of the day meant that, for instance, if the Tribune Corporation got such a channel on 720 kilocycles (kilohertz, today) the next-closest band had to be Detroit interests at 760 -- and yes, to this day, you can get WGN on 720 and there are days WJR comes into Cold Spring Shops in the evening with a stronger signal than WBBM on 780.  That made a cartel inevitable: at most you could put three or four clear-channel radio stations in each of the big cities without New York stepping on Boston or Philadelphia or Detroit stepping on Chicago or Cleveland, and, sure as you can say business opportunity, you get three or four national networks: American, Columbia, National, and Mutual.

After the War, broadcast television became a thing, and, again, the technocrats created assets out of thin air, but for reasons arcane and complicated, there was only bandwidth for twelve "very high frequency" channels (these signals were good for fifty miles at best) and a larger number of "ultra high frequency" channels (and these signals were anemic, and more recently some of that bandwidth was reallocated to other purposes.)  You've still got the problem of Chicago stepping on Milwaukee or Detroit stepping on Toledo, and people in Sandusky getting hosed, without careful allocation of the twelve channels among the cities, and now you're down to three national television networks.  Mutual got crowded out.

Note, though, how the relegation of public affairs programming to the idle hours follows almost inevitably.  With only three national providers of content, you're likely to get an unstable, minimum differentiation equilibrium with similar sorts of entertainment, particularly during prime time.  Thus, for a while, a lot of Westerns, there have been periodic attempts to make the law entertaining, and lots of procedurals, and hours of hurt and infidelity during the day.

That was all too much for cartel manager, er, Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow, who is still among us.

“To me, the children were being badly shortchanged by not having adequate children’s programming,” Newton said. “There were too many commercials, there were not enough educational [programs], the network news was 15 minutes. I felt that this great gift, this great technology was being wasted. That’s what I meant by ‘vast wasteland.'”

Back then, there were only three networks featuring trusted anchors like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, whose coverage abided by the Fairness Doctrine of 1949.

“The Fairness Doctrine was a policy adopted by the FCC which had two parts,” Newton said. “First, encouraging broadcasters to cover controversial issues. Second, they would give not just one side; they would be balanced with different views of that issue. … I’m sorry it has been abandoned, because our country has been so badly divided.”

We can forgive the commissioner for not being aware of the subtleties of oligopoly theory, which were still in a rudimentary form and often more explicitly about spatial competition, at the time he made his initial statements as chairman.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you’ll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.

It's hard to find a more perfect paradigm of the sensibilities of the Liberal Establishment.  You can't have any fun on your three hour tour.  "'The shocking aftermath of that designation of responsibility by Mr. Minow and the FCC gave ABC, CBS, and NBC absolute authority over everything that comes into your living room on network television,' Gilligan's Island creator Sherwood Schwartz wrote in Inside Gilligan's Island."

Reason's Paul Matzko concurs with Mr Schwartz in part, and dissents in part.

In the early 1960s, the Kennedy administration quickly realized that the Fairness Doctrine could be useful as a tool for suppressing political dissent. If the fairness mandate was applied selectively—only forcing stations with conservative programming to increase the amount of liberal programming they aired and not vice versa—the administration could simultaneously punish their right-wing critics and extract free pro-administration airtime.

I tell that story in detail in my book The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement, but suffice it to say here that the Fairness Doctrine enabled the most successful government censorship campaign of the last half century. It might, with greater accuracy, be titled the Unfairness Doctrine, given its use to suppress political dissent and protect the lies of incumbents from both major parties, including Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.

By the early 1970s, the targeted conservative broadcasters had largely been silenced, but the memory of the Fairness Doctrine era left an impression on a young Rush Limbaugh.

That's one interpretation, although, arguably, Mr Minow's criticism of the banality of commercial television might well have midwived federal support for public broadcasting.  If the Sunday public affairs programming isn't pitched to the sensibilities of the Credentialed Establishment, now, there's a whole network providing that stuff.

Contrary to conservative talk radio hosts who explain their dominance by the existence of a silent majority of average Joe listeners, ironically it was the federal government that boosted right-wing dominance of talk radio.

As historian Brian Rosenwald argues, left-wing talk radio hosts had to compete for listeners with government-subsidized, center-left NPR affiliates, while right-wing hosts had a clearer competitive field. Station owners could guarantee a larger audience to advertisers simply by picking right-wing instead of left-wing talk radio programs. Talk radio's conservative bent is the unintended product of the government's halfhearted attempt to create a nationalized broadcasting system in the 1970s. (Though I wouldn't expect a "Rush was Made Possible By Listeners like You" slogan to appear on a complimentary NPR tote bag any time soon.)

Now that distinctions among the various uses of the spectrum are subject to fewer technical constraints, and that server and network capacity is relatively cheap, perhaps there is sufficient capacity for handling information that a "fairness doctrine" from an era of tighter constraints is no longer necessary.  The chairman, and his daughter Nell, who as far as I know has never been tied to the tracks, aren't so sure.

“We have people living under two sets of facts,” Newton said. “People even say it’s OK to have a set of ‘alternative facts.’ You can’t have alternate facts. A fact is a fact.”

Tell that to the postmodernists and their "speaking her truth" piffle.

“What I’d like to see is a statement from [president^* Joe] Biden or [vice-president Kamala] Harris saying, ‘Look, I’m not telling you who to believe, I’m telling you that whatever you listen to, check it out,'” Nell said. “Do they correct themselves when they make a mistake? Do they name sources? Link to the original documents? … I love WTOP because it gives you the straight story.”

Problem is, no politician will ever willingly do that, or willingly concede being caught out.  And Mr Minow is unlikely to have the courage to call for sunset legislation abolishing the Federal Communications Commission, despite all the damage it has done.