Fairness Doctrine Loses, but Issue Due to Resurface in 1988

The Fairness Doctrine, a relatively obscure broadcasting rule that became the chief political football this past week in a threatened presidential veto of a $600-billion federal spending bill, was defeated late Monday, but will resurface again in the new year according to proponents and opponents alike.

The 38-year-old defunct Federal Communications Commission policy that used to require the nation’s 10,000 commercial radio and television stations to broadcast diverse opinions on controversial public issues, was attached as an amendment to the joint Senate-House spending bill until late Monday. After a week of wrangling, rhetoric and eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, however, federal lawmakers finally blinked. Giving in to White House veto threats, Senate leaders stripped the Fairness Doctrine from the bill and sent it to the President for signature.

“Last night was not the end,” House telecommunications subcommittee aide Larry Irving said Tuesday. “Last night was a game of chicken, and the White House clucked last. You don’t throw 40 years of established policy down the drain over a matter of procedure, and this was clearly a matter of procedure.”

The House subcommittee will resurrect the rule in 1988, Irving declared. The subcommittee began fighting to codify the Fairness Doctrine after it was first abolished by the FCC on Aug. 4.

“They (the FCC) don’t know what they’re doing,” said Sen. Ernest Hollings (D-S.C.), who chairs the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, which oversees telecommunications issues. “You’ve got a bunch of children over there (at the FCC).”

“There are enough able, competent and creative lawmakers who want it to come back to assure that it probably will,” said National Assn. of Broadcasters public affairs spokeswoman Susan Kraus.

NAB President Edward O. Fritts, who launched the two-month-long all-out NAB drive to lobby against the Fairness Doctrine on Capitol Hill, said in a prepared statement that broadcasters will offer more--not less--diversity on the air as a result of the defeat of the policy.

But the congressional supporters of the policy were not so sure commercial broadcasters would be so public-spirited.

Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Merced), assistant House majority leader and former chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (the House Democrats’ primary campaign organization), referred to some commercial broadcasters as “rich mongrels” and “fat cats” during a phone interview with talk show host Michael Jackson that aired Tuesday over KABC-AM (790) in Los Angeles. Coelho told Jackson that the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine would be used as an excuse by some commercial broadcasters to put more sitcoms on television at the expense of public affairs programming.

“Primarily, what’s happening is that in a lot of parts of the country, very conservative, wealthy individuals are buying up some radio and television stations and using the public airwaves for their own views,” Coelho told The Times on Tuesday. “There is no opportunity for those of a different political persuasion to respond.”

Public-interest lobbying groups, which spearheaded the drive to reinstitute the policy after the FCC abolished it, will now shift their focus from Congress to the federal courts. There, a lawsuit challenging the FCC’s right to kill the Fairness Doctrine has been lying dormant for the past two months.

“What this does is reignite the litigation,” said Andy Schwartzman of the Media Access Project, which filed the lawsuit. “We were already in court in our challenge to the FCC last August, but we put it on the back burner. We always thought our chances in court were quite good but thought Congress would save us the trouble.”

Schwartzman’s organization was joined by Common Cause, People for the American Way, the United Church of Christ, Black Citizens for Fair Media and Ralph Nader’s public-interest lobby in challenging the FCC’s abolition of the Fairness Doctrine. The NAB formally intervened on the FCC’s side in the lawsuit. Both sides will file briefs no later than February, according to Schwartzman.

Public broadcasting lobbies have remained neutral on the Fairness Doctrine since the Senate dropped a measure a week ago that would have tied the policy to a broadcast license transfer fee law. That bill, introduced in early November by Hollings, would have imposed a penalty fee on commercial broadcasters who violated the Fairness Doctrine and, then, sold their broadcasting license. Under the Hollings plan, the penalty fees would have been added to other license transfer fees and held in trust for public broadcasters.

Abolition of the Fairness Doctrine does not mean the end of the FCC’s equal-time rule, which continues to require both commercial and public broadcasters to give political candidates airtime once they have declared their candidacy. Nevertheless, Fairness Doctrine proponents such as Coelho still see a threat.

McDougal reported from Los Angeles; Tumulty from Washington.