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Fairness to Reagan. And: Background of the fairness doctrine
I rewrote the article a bit, so it no longer seemed that Reagan was opposing "fairness". Rather, he was championing free speech. That's fair, isn't it?
I rewrote the article a bit, so it no longer seemed that Reagan was opposing "fairness". Rather, he was championing free speech. That's fair, isn't it?
:Yes. I was in a hurry to correct an article which indicated that the fairness doctrine was still in effect, and wasn't fussing too much about politics.
:As to why...
:My recollection... shooting from the hip... is that it had nothing much to do with investment, but with the idea that there were no ownership rights to the electromagnetic spectrum. It was a "commons," although I don't think that phrase was used at the time. Broadcasters did not own their spectrum, they licensed it. A condition of the license was that they were required to serve the public interest. The fairness doctrine sprang from that.
:I believe the concept of public service was part of the Communications Act of 1936, which opened up the airwaves to commercial use.
:The parallels with the Internet are very strong. It was, essentially, the universities and colleges that did all the heavy lifting in the pioneering of broadcast radio. There was great debate about commercializing the airwaves. There was serious consideration given to keeping it restricted to nonprofit use, and the universities were very annoyed at the possibilities of their doing all the hard work and businesses reaping the rewards, and concerned about getting squeezed the air completely if commercial interests were allowed.
:In the end, Congress gave business about 90% of what they wanted, but set some special rules that kept a portion of the radio spectrum open for educational broadcasting. I don't remember what happened on the AM dial, but that's basically why virtually all the campus broadcasting stations (which includes most of the NPR outlets) are at the low end of the FM dials.
:I remember reading that for first few years of ''commercial'' broadcasting, it was usual for ''commercial'' stations to turn off their transmitters one full day of the week, to give listeners a shot at receiving more distant stations. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith]] 11:33, 16 May 2007 (EDT)