Fairness Doctrine a Zombie?

For all the talk on the Hill from the likes of Schumer et. al., reapplication of the Fairness Doctrine maybe a dead letter on the floor. It appears that a subset of the House Democrats consider such efforts passe’ in light of today’s technology —

Cardin and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) were asked if a station like the Washington, D.C.-based WMAL, which has a lineup of conservative hosts, including Chris Plante, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Marc Levin, should be controlled by the government so they offer more balanced content.

“Well first of all, I think that a station should have a balanced approach. I think they are doing their listeners a service when they provide all sides to an issue, but quite frankly, there is more variety today than we’ve had in recent years,” Cardin said. “We have a lot of radio stations that are providing all different types of points of view, and I think there’s a lot of self-selection here. There’s a lot of listeners who are saying, ‘Look, we are going to listen to stations that are balanced,’ so I think the market in some respects is working this out.” …

“I think it’s increasingly difficult because it’s kind of like a balloon. In other words, even if you wanted to go there — and I’m not saying we do — but if you wanted to go there, when you squeeze one end of the balloon, you know, simply the conversation can just go to others,” [Van Hollen] said. “I think even if you wanted to go back to the Fairness Doctrine, technology may have passed it by.”

I must say it is refreshing for at least some of the political leadership to realize that technology has made concepts of balance in content delivery a moot point. If they realize that the technology represents millions of individual voices rather than just a couple of thousand of communication outlets then chances of a FD is pretty much dead.

Morrissey makes the point correctly –

Only broadcast channels such as terrestrial television and radio fall under the FCC’s aegis now. Imposing greater restrictions would inevitably lead to the demise of broadcasters, especially in the AM band. Without politics, most of these stations would cease to exist, and Van Hollen correctly notes that the content would just move to another medium. The FD would not keep anyone from accessing information that they wanted to get — it would just ensure job losses and irrelevance for AM radio.

I would go so far as to say that the genie is out of the bottle and spreading. To acquire the desired affects that Schumer would want would be to regulate all the way down to the CPE level. You would not be able to watch Sean Hannity without watching Chris Mathews on your fancy G1 right after. Any thing less is cluelessness.

Linky.