Reply #18: Fairness Doctrine Never Gave Equal Time... [View All]

[KharmaTrain]

From one who worked with it...it was to enable all candidates to be able to buy airtime for commercials and prohbit one party from monopolizing the commercial time or a station from price gouging...charging whatever they felt for ads...charging Repugnicans one rate and Democrats another or refusing to sell time to a party or candidate the owner didn't like. Last election cycle we saw the GOOP try to monopolize advertising time and it drove them into debt...also there was a ton of price gouging that kept many candidates off the air due to the high costs in the closing days of the campaign. There definitely needs to be a re-instatement of these rules, but it won't have any affect on political speech.

Programs like Rushbo & O'Reilly and other hate mongers are considered "content" and never were covered under equal time...nor was news coverage.

I agree there needs to be a total revisit to the '96 dereg rules that allowed the large corporates to monopolize the airwaves and eliminate many of the rules that they operate under.

Some of my suggestions are similar to yours...re-instituting caps on the number of stations a company can own in a market, re-instating requirements for public service and news programming as a condition for license renewal, returning the licensing period from the current 10 years to 3 years and make it less expensive and time consuming for groups to challenge a license, give preference to local ownership in the sale of stations and abolishing most LMA or Limited Management Agreements that allowed corporates to control even more stations through shell corporations.

I've posted on this topic numerous times and I expect there to be changes ahead as the large corporations suffocate under their own largess. The proposed Clear Channel bail out will put over 450 small market stations on the market...or just may have them shut off (to maintain the over-inflated "stick" or license prices that prohibit all but the very, very rich from owning any broadcast license).