Forum Post: If mainstream media is broken....

...then let's fight to fix it. There's a way to begin that process as things stand now. I have no personal problem with what's on cable; I'm simply not buying cable because I honestly have no use for it and probably never will. Cable is pay-to-play, and if people will pay for tits and TMZ then all they'll get is tits and TMZ. Broadcast TV, however, is not pay-to-play. It's freely available to anyone with a TV and a converter box, and there was a time when it was in fact a reliable source of information and investigative journalism.

I love Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, partially because I agree with them politically, but the fact remains that they're comedians. Funnymen. They're the guys you're supposed to watch after you've had your fill of serious journalism when you want to laugh at the current state of the world, and yet they're actually no less reliable than typical network news. They have no obligation to fact check their material or provide intelligent commentary (even though they generally do those things), but the network news (which most reasonable people would argue does have such an obligation) is no more accurate or intelligent than they are. That, to my mind, is the problem. There are simple and fairly conservative (in the sense of scope rather than political alignment) measures that would cut out a lot of the crap, namely the Fairness Doctrine and the Equal Time Rule.

As far as I'm aware, the rationale for dropping the Fairness Doctrine was that the sheer breadth of channels available on things like cable TV meant that we could endorse the "anything goes" mentality because if the field was wide enough then surely somebody would keep the public interest in mind and journalism would get better for the lack of regulation. Did that actually happen? Absolutely not. Actual good investigative journalism became much harder to find on the airwaves, and generally the group that would go out of its way to look for it was the group that needed it the least.

The Equal Time Rule would also be a great way to deal with changing the way we run campaigns in this country, as it pretty much dictates that no television station or overtly political event, save a few exceptions, may offer different airtime rates for different candidates and are required to give the candidates the same sweetheart rates that they give firms with whom they have a close relationship. I would expand its scope a bit so that actual debates would be subject to these provisions (providing an appropriate forum for independent candidates) and consider requiring broadcast TV stations to provide actual equal advertising time to all who request it.

Also, just a little side note: the Fairness Doctrine provided a very wide latitude to television stations as to how controversial political issues are presented or how different points and counterpoints are presented (format, style, length, etc.). A 1-to-1 equal time rule for different views was also not enforced and in fact was not part of the doctrine. The point was that differing views must be given their chance to be heard, and the standards of how this was to be accomplished was left up to the stations themselves. It was a way of holding broadcast TV to decent journalistic standards without exerting influence over which views were or were not "allowed".

To the people who want to cry censorship: there are already things that you can't say or do on broadcast TV because it is public airspace (the "Seven Words You Can't Say on TV" routine is one of the more humorous examples); the only reason I can think of that those rules should even exist is that on some level broadcast TV should be required to maintain a minimum level of usefulness for the American people. If we're going to sanitize broadcast TV the least we can do is put more intelligent programming on it.