The Capitol insurrection brought renewed attention to the dangers of disinformation and conspiratorial politics and has sparked new efforts to curb the reach of such conspiracies. While that happened quickly with former President Donald Trump, who has been deplatformed and impeached, addressing the more entrenched problem of the right-wing media landscape has proven more difficult.
Enter the Fairness Doctrine, a regulation in place from the late 1940s until 1987 that dictated balanced coverage of controversial issues on broadcast radio and television. After its repeal, Rush Limbaugh's radio show and Fox News quickly emerged to become two of the most influential political institutions in the US, the cornerstone of a right-wing media ecosystem of radio shows, cable networks and online platforms that would flourish in the coming decades.
A popular argument, commonly made when frustrations with right-wing media peak, and back in vogue after the insurrection, goes something like this: reinstate the Fairness Doctrine and you eliminate the scourge of right-wing media. It's an inviting idea. No wonder everyone from New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang to Washington Post columnist Max Boot have landed on it in recent weeks.
The problem with this idea is that the Fairness Doctrine emerged in a time when the central concern was the scarcity of platforms; now, misinformation and disinformation flourish in an environment of abundance. Why try to retrofit an old regulation on a new media environment, unless you've imbued that regulation with magical properties, a belief that it is a fix-all for a set of deeply embedded, systemic problems?
Policy panaceas for widespread social and political problems should always be met with skepticism. But this one deserves to be rejected out of hand.
The poorly understood history of the Fairness Doctrine shows not only that reinstating it won't fix current political media crises, but also that it won't be the check on conservative media's worst offenses that so many want it to be.