By Bruce Fein,Washington Times
- Attacks on Talk Radio are set to begin
As general counsel to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under President Ronald Reagan,I initiated regulatory repeal of the ill-conceived Fairness Doctrine that had suppressed free speech over the airwaves since 1949 by penalizing the broadcast of controversial issues. FCC Chairman Newton Minnow surveyed the broadcast scene in 1961 when the doctrine was in its golden age. He described what he saw as a “vast wasteland.”
The FCC’s repeal,buttressed by its 1985 Report Concerning General Fairness Doctrine Obligations of Broadcast Licensees,was ultimately affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Syracuse Peace Council v. FCC (1989). During the ensuing 19 years,not a crumb of evidence has surfaced suggesting that controversial subjects have been shortchanged in the broadcasting marketplace of ideas –the evil that the Fairness Doctrine purported to address.