Last week, after we blasted you with 45 minutes on the history of the Fairness Doctrine, we promised we’d give you some drama, some controversy, and talk about just what made this subject a hot button partisan issue. After all, the rule enjoyed significant support on both sides of the political aisle, even as it was being neutered by the FCC! 

The controversy

How did conversation about this policy devolve into a polarized partisan argument? Well, there are some scholars who believe that there is one case - one man, to be exact - that heralded the division of opinion on this topic down party lines. That man is the Rev. Carl D. McIntire, and his radio station - WXUR - is the only radio or television station in American history to be denied a broadcasting license renewal solely on the basis of Fairness Doctrine violations.

 

As part of his doctoral thesis work at Pennsylvania State University, Patrick Farabaugh tells the story of how McIntire’s crusade against the Fairness Doctrine may have contributed to the rule’s demise, and the strong stance many conservatives took against the policy. 

 

A little background:  Rev. McIntire, and ultrafundamentalist evangelical preacher,  got his first taste of radio in 1936 when WPEN out of Philadelphia began broadcasting his Sunday evening sermons. This relationship continued for 9 years, until the station changed its policy concerning religious programming in an effort to give listeners a more diverse spectrum of religious voices. McIntire, in partnership with other local religious leaders, filed a complaint with the FCC alleging that WPEN was violating their freedom of religious expression with their new policy. The FCC took no action against the station, but they did take a firm position as prime opponent for Carl McIntire. 

 

In 1955, McIntire debuted his 30 minute talk radio program called the Twentieth Century Reformation Hour using time purchased from Rev. John M. Norris, owner of the Red Lion Broadcasting Group’s WGCB-AM station which would soon come to its own fame as part of a case central to the constitutionality of the Fairness Doctrine. The show was well received, and by 1958 it was airing on 13 stations throughout the Northeast. By 1964 - the peak of his popularity among evangelical audiences - McIntire could be heard daily on 610 stations and boasted an audience of more than 10m listeners. The show also brought in more than $3m in contributions that year. 

 

In 1964, the Anti-Defamation League filed the first FCC complaint against McIntire’s show, claiming that it was a “medium for spreading racial and religious discord.” And, several stations dropped the program as a result, citing increasing criticism and fear of repercussions from the FCC . One station owner, in response to a listener letter, said that the  “Federal Communications Commission has put the broadcaster in a most awkward position of having to give equal time to groups having opposing viewpoints to those of another group which purchases time for the presentation of their ideas in the case of controversial issues. It has the effect of putting the broadcaster right in the middle of a big squeeze.” 

 

As stations continued to drop the show from their broadcast lineups, McIntire grew vocal in his blame toward the FCC for the loss of his platform.  He asked his listeners to write letters to the FCC in protest, and they did! The FCC received more than 25,000 complaints from his listeners.  When the FCC singled McIntire’s show out in a memo to station owners, his vitriol grew. He railed against the organization, accusing them of violating his constitutional rights, and calling for a full investigation by Congress into the over-reach of the agency. 

 

As the summer of 1964 continued, so did the tug of war between McIntire and his conservative base and the FCC. And, a new player - Samuel Brightman, Deputy Chairman of Public Affairs for the DNC - entered the ring, addressing broadcasters of the Twentieth Century Reformation Hour directly and requesting time on each to address the attacks made against him, the committee, and its policies. And oh, was theirs an epic feud. Seriously, it so closely rivals the shenanigans we see in modern politics that it’s scary.  Take the time to go read some of Dr. Farabaugh’s dissertation.

 

More stations removed McIntire from their lineups as the summer progressed, all citing the Fairness Doctrine, refusal to “broadcast a defense of liberalism,” and fear of reprisal as their reasoning. One station manager even said, in a letter to McIntire, “If a solution to the problem presented by the fairness doctrine is worked out, I would like to resume your program …”

 

In Fall 1964, the Faith Theological Seminary (for which McIntire served as president of the Board of Directors) purchased controlling interest in WXUR in Media PA and applied for a transfer of broadcasting license. While the first letters the FCC received concerning the transfer application were in opposition, McIntire soon rallied his support base to send letters urging the FCC to allow the transfer. In 1965, despite “a serious question” raised by the FCC Commissioner that McIntire and WXUR would place his personal virtues above the station’s public interest obligations, the license transfer was indeed granted. McIntire did, after all, promise to operate in the public interest rather than his own private purposes. They even promised a weekly inter-faith dialogue show as part of the application! 

 

Except that they didn’t keep that promise. As soon as the Reformation Hour began broadcasting again, McIntire immediately took up his campaign against the FCC and the Fairness Doctrine. They made no good-faith efforts to bring in commentators of other faiths, or to present more than one side of any story as a part of their programming. And, the locals revolted.  Demanding change on both a local and state level. Eventually a resolution was passed in the PA House of REpresentatives asking the FCC to investigate WXUR for failure to comply with the Fairness Doctrine, and singling out McIntire’s programming specifically. 

 

The resolution read: The views which the Reverend McIntire expounds are those which we now equate with the word “extremism.” The danger of such views to our country is self-evident. That

such views are rejected by a majority of our citizens was demonstrated by the election

returns in November 1964… 

 

New Jersey soon followed suit with its own resolution. But throughout this time, McIntire doubled down publicly on his stance that government censorship through the FCC. and religious persecution from PA Democrats were to blame for the pushback against the fundamentalist, racist, and generally otherwise appalling content aired during his show and others on the same station.  

 

But the did FCC investigate, and hold a hearing regarding the license renewal for WXUR. After 9 months of review, an FCC Examiner determined that WXUR was, in fact, serving the public interest by providing the only source of Fundamentalist perspective in the area. However, that decision was appealed and overturned in July 1970 and WXUR lost its Federal Broadcasting License. 

 

The ire sparked by the decision radiated throughout the conservative Christian media, which rallied around McIntire to make the case that he had been singled out and censored for his conservative beliefs. It also raised questions among more progressive organizations about the limits of government reach in the context of speech. 

 

McIntire continued his escapades with off-shore radio stations and court injunctions, railing against the unfairness of the Fairness Doctrine to conservative voices as long as anyone would listen.  And then, as the balance of power on the FCC and in government shifted more conservative with President Reagan, that rallying cry grew louder and louder until the rule eventually met its demise. 

 

And that, dear listeners, is the story of how the Fairness Doctrine became a weapon of partisan politics. 

The Chilling Effect of Free Speech

We’ve talked several times about the intended effect of the fairness doctrine: ensuring that every side of a matter of public importance had air time on any given radio station. Put another way, no radio station could legally refuse to air an argument for, against, or otherwise, about any given topic of public importance.

 

The thought process was that humans, as a rule, are given to valuing and pushing certain ideas above others. We all do it: some people like cats more than dogs, or hot dogs more than hamburgers, or the soul sucking, depressing, mid-summer heat to the glorious, refreshing, invigorating snap of winter air. Fight me; I hate being hot.

Sometimes, however, preferences and beliefs are not so benign. I think we’ve seen it illustrated only too vividly in recent years, but in matters that people believe to go beyond personal preference and stretch into the very moral foundations of society - in these matters people tend to abandon things like tolerance, reason, or civility. How many religious crusades and jihads have there been? How many riots because some politician did something that half their constituents didn’t like? How many coups or coup attempts?

 

When we are faced with these deeply rooted beliefs, and specifically, when those beliefs are being challenged, we, as a whole, tend to get a little ugly.

Sometimes we get a lot ugly.

So, in order to head off this eventuality, and probably less altruistically to prevent threats to the government from things like extremist radio, why not enact a law that requires there to be equal coverage of the sides when an important issue is being discussed? With facts from all sides in hand, a discerning American will be able to come to sensible and reasoned conclusions, and the chances of a less than sensible American becoming radicalized in some way are reduced.

Side note, I’m not saying this is the specific reasoning for why this law was enacted. I’m taking some liberty in translating the ideas into more modern terminology and reading into the logic a bit. “Radicalization” wasn’t quite the trigger word in the 1930s as it was now, but the implication is there.

 

And this is where we run into the most powerful law in politics: the law of unintended consequences. The number of times a law has backfired and hurt those it was ostensibly meant to help, or maybe worse, done the exact opposite of what it was meant to do, is likely inestimable.

A famous anecdote tells the story about when the British ruled Delhi, India. As the story goes, the British were terrified of the large amount of venomous snakes in the area. In order to deal with this problem, the British put a bounty on cobras, paying for each dead snake brought to them. The residents of Delhi recognized the potential of such a setup pretty quickly, and began breeding cobras to bring in for the bounty. After the British discovered the scheme, they ended the bounty program. Faced with a handful of snakes and no use for them, breeders released them into the wild. Suddenly, there were even more cobras than before the bounty program began!

If you want a more recent story: look no further than sex education. Whenever abstinence only education is the sole method of preventing teenage pregnancy in some states, the teen pregnancy rate goes up. “For every $1.00 per pupil increase in funding for abstinence-only education, the teen birthrate rose by 0.30 per 1,000 in conservative states compared with moderate states.” (Banerjee, 2019)

There are similar stories in various places and times (interestingly, gun buy back programs may lead to a similar effect if they’re implemented without taking such a possibility into consideration), but you get the point. Just because a law is good on the surface does not mean the effects of that law will be good. The common factor in every case of unintended consequences is a failure to consider the realities of human nature. People who want money are going to look for ways to make easy money. Teenagers are gonna have sex. Stop clutching your pearls.

And so we come to the Fairness Doctrine. When it was enacted, it failed to take into account human nature. Or, more precisely, the risk averse nature of businesses. There were a couple of ways that a broadcaster could run afoul of the Fairness Doctrine: they could either fail to cover a matter of public importance entirely, or fail to provide air time to all sides of the issue. In theory, this would ensure not only that a broadcaster covered the next “important thing,” but also that they covered it fairly. However, after it was implemented, broadcasters were most often dinged for violations by failing to provide “all valid opposing viewpoints air time on a given issue.” They were very infrequently cited for failing to cover an important issue at all. (Ruane, 2011, 6) 

 

Remember that violations could lead to a number of outcomes, from forcing the station to allow other sides equal air time to revocation of a broadcast license. No matter the punishment, though, it always meant one thing: reduced profits. Now, I’m not sure what the business environment in the 1930s was like, but I do know that the bottom dollar was the final authority on whether or not that business would do something. Eventually, broadcasters caught on that they were more likely to be punished for inadequate coverage than for not covering something at all. When faced with the dilemma, they did what any business would: they eliminated the risk. If they could get in trouble for failing to cover all sides, the simple answer was… just don’t cover any sides. (Ruane, 2011, 6)

Well, why didn’t they just ensure they had covered the issue, then? It was legally their responsibility, after all. That’s true. However, stations faced litigation even when they had met their obligations, because, according to the commission assigned to review the Fairness Doctrine, the process of review “necessarily involved a vague standard, the application and meaning of which is hard to predict.” (Federal Communications Commission, 1987)

 

And then, even if they had met their obligation, and decided to fight an accusation that they had not, they faced another expense: the cost of defending the station against second-guessing from the government. If that case goes to court, that is an even further expense. If word gets out that they had violated the Fairness Doctrine, then they may face even further costs in the form of reduced listenership from an audience that feels as if their trust were betrayed. (Federal Communications Commission, 1987)

 

In 1987, the FCC found well over 60 reported instances in which the Fairness Doctrine inhibited broadcasters’ coverage of controversial issues. This inhibition came in many forms, from striking individual topics from coverage like issues such as the nuclear arms race, religious cults, and municipal salaries, to entire policies refusing acceptance of nationally produced programming that covered controversial topics. (Federal Communications Commission, 1987)

 

Put simply, the Fairness Doctrine disincentivised broadcasters taking any sort of risk in programming, instead forcing them into a sort of homogenic, safe boundary of popular beliefs and cultural acceptance. The farther any given topic was from “mainstream,” the less likely it was to receive airtime from a broadcaster.

Mythbusting

I do want to take a moment to address a persistent claim around the Fairness Doctrine. Or, more importantly, the revocation of the Fairness Doctrine. Among some circles, there is the belief that ending the Fairness Doctrine gave birth to conservative talk radio. You know the types. Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Brian Kilmeade… Rush Limbaugh. This argument actually focuses pretty exclusively on Limbaugh. The argument is that, if the Fairness Doctrine had remained in effect, Limbaugh would not have been able to have a radio station format that was solely focused on conservative audiences, since he would have been obligated to provide a balancing counterpoint. (Rosentiel, 2007)

 

Andrew Schawrtzman of the Media Access Project disagrees with this theory, and I gotta say I think he makes a compelling argument. It’s tempting to correlate the birth of conservative talk shows with the end of the Fairness Doctrine, since the seemed to happen one right after the other. But the majority reason for this explosion? Cost of owning a station. Instead of developing local talent, radio stations were beginning to use syndicated programming, meaning that they could just bring in someone who had already proven themselves for relatively cheap. A large portion of those nationally successful voices were conservative talk hosts, like Limbaugh. (Rosentiel, 2007)

Now, it’s possible the end of the Fairness Doctrine allowed Limbaugh to establish himself, thus enabling his national presence. But to say it was the only thing holding him back ignores the greater context of what was happening in the radio world during the 80s. I only point it out to highlight the tricky nature of determining causation. This is a great example of how correlation and causation are not always the same. For whatever reason, conservative talk radio remains excessively popular when compared to other types of content. In fact, in 2019 (the most recent accounting I could find), 6 out of the top 10 national radio shows were conservative. (Talkers, 2019)

Should we bring it back? In some form or another? 

Opinion time! 

Good News 

Chief officers at several national restaurant chains have communicated to their investors this week that an increase in the minimum wage would not have a significant impact on the well-being of their chains.  In fact, the CFO of Denny’s has indicated that increased minimum wage for workers in their California restaurants has actually translated into improved customer traffic. This is a great indicator for those championing an increased minimum wage. And if you want to know more about the controversy surrounding that… we’ve got an episode for you.