An Editor's Reaction

In Idaho Speech, Robert Kennedy Jr. Lambasts the Media

By Jonathan Weber , 6-15-07

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental activist and son of the late Senator Robert Kennedy, was the keynote speaker at the Sun Valley Wellness Festival in late May, and yesterday I read a lengthy account of the talk on Sun Valley Online (a New West affiliate). I was amazed to find that a chunk of the speech was about how the various alleged sins of the Bush Administration were the fault of the media, and could be traced to, of all things, the 1988 repeal of a Federal Communications Commission regulation known as the Fairness Doctrine. It’s one of the oddest analyses of media and public policy that I’ve seen in a long time, and I think it’s worth discussing here because it illustrates the extent to which otherwise savvy people can remain frighteningly clueless about the changes in the media world - and also says a few things about why liberal Democrats generally have a tough time in places like Idaho.

According to the Sun Valley Online story, Kennedy declared flatly that “the decline in American media began in 1988,” when the Reagan Administration threw out the Fairness Doctrine. In Kennedy’s telling, the Fairness Doctrine held that because broadcasters used the public airwaves, they had some obligations to operate in the public interest, and that meant they had to report on news that was “of public import,” they had to give equal time to differing points of view (which means you “couldn’t have Fox News"), and there had to be diversity of ownership. Never mind that the Fairness Doctrine says nothing about media ownership, and was not “a law...passed in 1928,” as Kennedy apparently stated, but rather an FCC rule that was first put in place in 1949; let’s consider the logic of the argument.

For starters, the Fairness Doctrine, which basically called for equal time on controversial public policy issues, by definition only applied to over-the-air broadcasting. We do have something called the First Amendment in this country, which assures the right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and laws giving the government the power to regulate news coverage are normally unconstitutional. The Fairness Doctrine was upheld, barely, by the Supreme Court in 1969, but the rule relied entirely on the idea that broadcast frequencies are a scarce public resource and thus the government is within its rights to impose some requirements on broadcast licenses. It never did, and never could, apply to cable television. But wait, isn’t Fox News a cable channel?

In the age of the Internet, broadcast TV and radio have an ever-shrinking share of the audience as people get their news and entertainment by other means. (I thought everyone knew this). Evidently, in Kennedy’s ideal world, all media outlets would be subject to sweeping government rules dictating what they should report - requiring equal time here, fair response there and an ongoing determination of whether sufficient attention was being paid to matters of “public import.”

As a media proprietor I could, in principle, be required to publish a counter-point to this piece defending Kennedy’s point of view, or giving him space to rebut me. Oh, wait, the Fairness Doctrine never applied to newspapers (and of course the Internet didn’t exist in 1949), so I guess the rule would kick in only if I did this was an audio or video piece. I could write this story on the site, but I couldn’t use it for the New West Newsminute radio broadcast (which runs on a local radio station) unless I gave the next broadcast to Kennedy. Things would be legal if transmitted over the Internet, but illegal if transmitted via satellite. Or something.

Kennedy rightly links a robust press to a robust democracy - you can’t have one without the other. And apparently he believes there was a golden age of democracy in this country, the Fairness Doctrine age, between 1949 and 1988. True, his late uncle was president somewhere in there, and I don’t begrudge him familial bias. But is there any evidence whatsoever that the electorate was more informed, and American democracy more robust, during those four decades than any other particular period in American history? That stretch did after all include McCarthyism, Richard Nixon, the Weather Underground, and a disastrous war waged at least partially on false pretenses, among other things.

I did a little research and found to my amazement that Kennedy isn’t the only liberal pining for the return of the benevolent editorial hand of the FCC. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) has been trying for years to bring it back, and you can read her take in an interview with Bill Moyers on the PBS Now site. Even Moyers, not exactly a Rush Limbaugh follower, seems a little taken aback by her arguments: “Who decides what fairness is?,” he says finally. “What is fair? What’s the truth?” Exactly.

Rush Limbaugh, of course, is very much the point. “You couldn’t have Rush Limbaugh and his ditto-heads for 24 hours a day on the same station,” in Kennedy’s fair world. And this from the Moyers/ Slaughter interview, after the good Congresswoman’s diatribe about Limbaugh:

MOYERS: Well, you know some serious people, including some liberals have said that one reason Rush Limbaugh has succeeded is because he is good entertainment.

SLAUGHTER: Exactly. He doesn’t make any pretense of being a news person or even telling you the truth. He says he’s an entertainer.

MOYERS: And you’re saying that kind of discourse is dominating America right now.

SLAUGHTER: Dominating America and a waste of good broadcast time and a waste of our airwaves.

MOYERS: Not to the people who agree with him.

As a journalist and publisher, I’m offended by the Fairness Doctrine in principle; this is my media outlet, and I will report things as I please, thank you very much. NewWest.Net has every desire and incentive to be fair and invite many points of view, but we sure don’t need the government telling us how to do it.

But I’m equally offended by the philosophical underpinnings of Kennedy’s argument. It says, in essence, that people support Republicans because they have been brainwashed by the media. The neo-Marxists philosophers of the early 20th century, trying to explain the failure of the workers of the world to rise up, developed the notion of “false consciousness,” and that’s really the idea that’s at play here. What you (Republican voter) say you want is not what’s really in your interest, and thus you could only want it if you’ve been duped in a deep way. What’s really in your interest is, well, what I say is in your interest, because I’m informed and my mind has not been clouded by Rush Limbaugh.

That, I submit, is not a very democratic way of thinking. And the arrogance of that approach is perhaps the single biggest reason that old-school liberals have been in the political wilderness for so long. Kennedy appparently drew a lot of applause from a heavily Democratic audience in Sun Valley. But if the party hopes to continue to make gains in this part of the country, where people above all don’t appreciate being told how to think or what they can and cannot say, they need to leave that philosophy in the history books.

Oh, and one last thing: since Kennedy also makes much of the warping effects of economic interests on media coverage, I should say that the Sun Valley Wellness Festival bought an ad on New West, which I appreciate very much. Indeed, I write this at some minor risk of angering an advertiser, and since I occupy the awkward (but very common) dual role of editor and publisher, I am aware of that. It is true enough that sometimes, in the media world as in life in general, there are conflicting incentives. Welcome to planet earth.

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