The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion by Zac Gershberg

Author:Zac Gershberg
Format: epub

How, then, did the rise of television coincide with the heyday of liberal democracy? Two ways. The first is short and specific to television, the other more complicated and tethered to the media environment in general. Television was, for its first several decades, quite limited. It was much like radio in this regard. Only a few networks, or channels, were available; the signals of broadcast media were, as a consequence of being deemed public airwaves, tightly regulated. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission had—and still has—the legal power to monitor network broadcasting. It demanded content in the public interest, and its Fairness Doctrine dictated that a reasonable effort be made to include both sides of a political discussion, given the scarcity of public airwaves. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutional viability of the doctrine for broadcast media in 1969. (The precedent of that case, Red Lion Broadcasting Company v. FCC, stands today, though the Fairness Doctrine was repealed in 1987.) The decision itself was juxtaposed to another unanimous Supreme Court decision a few years later, Miami Herald v. Tornillo from 1974. When the State of Florida attempted to enforce a right-of-reply statute against a newspaper and force it to run an op-ed from a subject of investigative reporting, the high court demurred, insisting that no such regulations could be imposed on print media.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.