Around this time last year I yearned for a return to the fairness doctrine, which was a policy enforced by the FCC from the 60s through the 80s that required broadcasters to report on issues of interest to the community and to provide equal time to opposing points of view. As I wrote in my previous posting, I believe our current broadcast news environment is saturated with, to put it bluntly, crap. While I can’t really say truthfully that I want a return to three networks and FCC strong-arming, there is some charm in the notion that television is about serving the public, about pursuing the stories we need to hear about, about presenting information in an unbiased way, about news in an age when news was about principles and not profit.

Tonight I attended a Q&A with Newton Minow, a former FCC chairman and all around interesting guy, and I posed to him my question about the fairness doctrine, something that has been floating around in my mind ever since I first learned about it in a class freshman year. Unfortunately, Mr. Minow misunderstood my question, and responded by saying that when AM radio seemed stagnant he opened up the FM spectrum and promoted it, and now FM broadcast is the dominent form of radio.

To some extent that is an answer. As I said, the Fairness Doctrine was created in a time with only a few radio and television networks, and thus very little consumer choice. In today’s world there is much more choice, or at least the illusion of it.

I have said that one of the reasons we cannot return to such a time is because of the diversity of media (used here as the plural for medium) in today’s marketplace. We have TV, radio, satellite TV, satellite radio, cable, the beginnings of broadcast over cellphone networks to our phones, etc. The public interest argument — that the scarce airwaves must be used to serve the public good, because they belong to the public — does not hold true with 85% or more of television consumers use cable or satellite. But tonight Susie pointed out to me — quite rightly — that “choice” in this context is a red herring. Cable companies operate as natural monopolies and give consumers no choice over what channel line-up they can receive. Verizon’s plans for television over their new fiber optic network will be the same way, with one big corporation controlling the content (and charging for it). As long as we have media gatekeepers in the form of monopoly carriers, we can never truly have choice.

Mr. Minow, responding to a question from Susie, stated that cable networks were built on the backs of broadcasters, whose signals continue to be sent over them because of “must carry” provisions in the law. But times change, companies change, and you have to wonder if the networks, who claim to be doing work in the public good but in reality are no subject to virtually no useful* public interest regulation, deserve to keep getting a free ride. Not that kicking them off of cable (or forcing them to pay their way) would necessarily change much, but it might cure one small symptom of the overarching disease.

(*I said useful regulations…I don’t consider obscenity and indecency regulation to be at all useful. Sure, I understand that society can feel the need to restrict certain types of content using the same types of public interest arguments as I’ve made here, and sure I am often an advocate of federal or state regulation to force certain behaviors, but on this one, at least, I would rather the markets decide, and let people simply choose not to watch such things. The argument of intrusiveness, to me, holds no water in this day and age.)