As a policy wonk, I really enjoyed this documentary for its emphasis on restoring local control to radio stations, so as to tailor to the standards, sensibilities and most importantly, the needs of individual communities. As a moderate Libertarian, I appreciate the power of local control over community affairs as reinforced by the constitution’s federal layout of the government; I rely on the assumption that when Californians are allowed to lobby Sacramento for policy rather than Washington, DC, policies remain more responsive to Californians’ needs (unfiltered by the astounding 30,000+ interest groups up on Capitol Hill). Similarly, a given community’s media should remain under local control in order to ensure a sense of responsiveness and local responsibility. The revelations of the FCC’s unwillingness to exert its sole regulatory function over broadcasters- its capacity to deny licenses to radio stations- shocked me, as the film exposes how Clear Channel retained its North Dakota license despite its failure in 2002 to report emergency warnings for Minot, North Dakota after a hazardous midnight ammonia spill, which may have contributed to the death of a North Dakotan. Overall I felt well-educated by watching this film.
Yet as is the tendency with documentaries, the presentation of issues was fairly one-sided. One central point I differed on was the gratuitously positive portrayal of The Fairness Doctrine. Sue Wilson argues that, just as polls show that Americans most trust PBS for its balanced portrayal of both sides of political issues, all media should be forced by the media to devote equal coverage to both sides of issues, especially in radio, a media overtly dominated by the Conservative perspective. To me, she argues for the reinstatement of The Fairness Doctrine under a façade of responsible journalism, while hiding the larger incentive that, by mandating equal coverage from radio stations, Clear Channel and other corporations with mainly Conservative broadcasts will see plummeting ratings, in a move that she hopes will kill Conservative Talk Radio rather than make radio fair. Surely America would be a nicer place to live if Limbaugh devotees and the like actually wanted to tune into the other side during the daily commute; if people didn’t actively engage in cognitive dissonance, political discourse could be a lot more civil. As the Simon and Garfunkel song The Boxer lamented, “All eyes ingest. Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” But we shouldn’t try to patch up this unfortunate reality by mandating fair coverage, because at least to me, if a large number of consumers demand a certain type of programming, the government should not step in on the grounds of content to contradict a market force, unless the will of the majority of consumers involves some offense like indecency, which the Supreme Court has ruled that the government can partially regulate. The distinction between the government regulating the offensiveness of bad language and the government regulating the possibly offensive right-wing slant of Talk Radio is that the Supreme Court has ruled that government can limit swears and the like in accord with community standards, whereas with equal time for differing viewpoints, the Supreme Court had argued against forced equal coverage in the 1974 case Miami Herald Publishing Company v. Tornillo (it ruled against forced equal newspaper space for political candidates on the basis of Freedom of the Press). I agree with the court’s ruling, because while equal coverage of competing sides is preferable, to mandate it would overstep the gov’t’s role in the press’ content. I think the left will have to just accept that the radio will remain the outlet of Conservative angst, serving as a bastion of fairly uniform thought out of Conservatives’ long history and comfort with it.
Overall I really enjoyed the movie :)