Should The Fairness Doctrine Be Brought Back?

The Fairness Doctrine saw news organizations bring a total balance to their political discussions. But would that be a good thing in today’s America? Farron Cousins discusses this.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Oh my God. I hope my question gets answered. Well, it is getting answered. Number one, big fans sub to you since 2015. Well, thank you very much. My question, what are your thoughts of the fairness doctrine, and do you think that it could be modernized, like have it where the provisions are kept, but also include podcasters as well to make it fair and informative? Will this be a good idea, or is that too much? Government overreach? Uh, for many, many, many, so very many years here at Ring of Fire, we have talked about how the, um, destruction of the fairness doctrine led to the media landscape that we have today. But the last time we had those conversations here at Ring of Fire was before, uh, really the podcaster area where anybody with a webcam and a microphone can launch a podcast and get their views out there to the world.

So, you know, eight years ago we needed the fairness doctrine Today, a and this might be where I, I break with Papp a little bit. I don't know his thoughts on it. Again, we haven't talked about it in years, but thinking about it today, could it even work with the podcasters, with YouTube, with, you know, all of the media that we have now? And to be perfectly honest, I don't think it could work. Now, I don't think you could have that. I think it would absolutely destroy independent media here in the United States. It would kill it. Now when the Fairness doctrine was in place, right? What did we have? Well, we didn't have cable news. If you wanted news, you had to tune into A B C N B C or c b s. That's it. And they only did news 30 minutes a day. And during that time, according to the Fairness doctrine, you had to present both sides of an issue. Fair enough. Right.

But once the media landscape started expanding after the Fairness doctrine was repealed, that's when you came up with all these one-sided. That's when you know you got your Fox Newses out of it. Now we've got even worse with Newsmax and one America. You get all these right wing podcasters that are terrible. And yeah, in instituting the fairness doctrine would destroy those people. The problem is you've got a lot of good, really good, really talented folks on the left as well. Some of them would probably thrive in that environment. I think Tom Hartman would, would become the most popular human on the planet. He is a modern day Ed Murrow. The rest of us, probably not so much. It would be very difficult to sit and have an actual conversation and present both sides when there's not actually both sides of a lot of issues. So, would it work today? I just don't think so. I, I, I truly, genuinely don't think that the fairness doctrine would, would be able to even work today.