The Speech Police

by NAT HENTOFF

BOTH IN AND OUT OF POLITICS, most liberals and conservatives share a deep conviction that, as George W. Bush has said, “there are limits to free speech.” From both sides, there is now a focus on getting government to mandate a “fair balance” of views on talk radio. Says conservative Senator Trent Lott (R-Mississippi), the famous eulogist for Strom Thurmond and once an icon of white supremacists: “Talk radio is running America.We have to deal with that problem.”

Meanwhile, the liberal, Washington-based Clintonian Center for American Progress has reminded Congress that “radio stations are licensed to operate in the public interest” and that the predominance of conservatives on talk radio “does not meet any reasonable public- interest standard.”

As a practitioner of heretical free speech, I am also reminded by the Clintonian Center’s concerns that safeguarding this fundamental freedom in any society has necessitated a fierce battle to prevent government from licensing any speech.

Nonetheless, Senator Dianne Feinstein (DCalifornia) attacks talk radio as “one-sided, dwelling in hyperbole” and “pushes people to extreme views.” She is leaning toward revival of the Fairness Doctrine to tame talk radio. During those golden, balanced years, she said on Fox News Channel during a dialogue with Trent Lott, “there was much more serious, correct reporting.”

Correct to whom?

From 1949 to 1987 the Federal Communications Commission enforced the Fairness Doctrine, which required radio stations to “devote a reasonable amount of time [according to FCC bureaucrats] to the discussion of controversial issues of public importance” and also “afford a reasonable opportunity for conflicting views” to be heard. A station failing to obey the doctrine could lose its license.

During the early years of that regimen, I was a full-time announcer and newsman at WMEX in Boston. Whenever the boss got a letter from the FCC with a listener’s complaint that we were being unfair, he called the station’s lawyers, had them review tapes of the offending broadcasts and became increasingly agitated. Finally, he summoned all of us and commanded that from then on there would be no controversy of any kind on WMEX airwaves.

Other radio stations around the country greatly cut down on anything resembling controversies, and Democratic and Republican administrations alike used the doctrine to punish stations favoring their opponents. For example, during the 1969 antiwar demonstrations—as the Wall Street Journal ’s John Fund and others have noted— President Richard Nixon “issued orders 21 times to aides to take specific action relating to what he considered unfair network news coverage.”

At last, in 1984, the Supreme Court—finally aware that with the growing profusion of radio and television stations, there was no scarcity of conflicting views on the air—ruled there was no need for the Fairness Doctrine (FCC v. League of Women Voters ).

Three years later the FCC itself emphatically declared that “the intrusion of government into the content of programming occasioned by the enforcement [of the Fairness Doctrine] restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters…[ and] actually inhibits the presentation of controversial issues of public importance.”

Undaunted, speech police around the country got Congress to revive the Fairness Doctrine in 1987! The margin in the House was 3 to 1, and it passed the Senate by nearly 2 to 1. But a former veteran of sports radio and television, President Ronald Reagan, vetoed the return of government intrusion into broadcast programming.

However, a stake was not driven into the heart of the Fairness Doctrine. In the House this year, Representative Maurice Hinchey (DNew York) reintroduced his Media Ownership Reform Act, which will prevent what he considers excessive ownership of the nation’s media outlets and also restore “fairness in broadcasting.” As before, broadcasting licenses will be taken away for failure to respect and revere the Fairness Doctrine. A Feinstein revival of the doctrine could well emerge in the Senate.

I suggest to Congress that unlike the wholly controlling government in George Orwell’s 1984, nobody in this country is compelled to listen to what they do not want to hear. And as to the undemocratic notion that “the public interest” mandates a government “balancing” of broadcast views, I bring forth as a witness a founder of this nation who exercised his heretical views at great peril when he wrote the Declaration of Independence.

“The legitimate powers of government,” Thomas Jefferson proclaimed, “reach actions only—and not opinions.”

Suddenly, on June 29 of this year, we were saved, for the time being, from the government managing political and other speech on the public airwaves when the House voted 39 to 115 to prohibit the Federal Communications Commission from restoring the Fairness Doctrine.

However, Democratic senators Feinstein and Dick Durbin (Illiniois), among others, would still like to see the return of the bureaucrats deciding the right “balance” for us in broadcasting. And a new President with a differently composed Congress could eventually bring back this doctrine that was, as I’ve noted, restored for a time even after the Supreme Court and the FCC declared it unconstitutional. So be forewarned!

Indeed, on the very day of the vote in the House, WNYC—New York City’s public radio station—invited me to come on for a forthcoming debate with a representative of FAIR, a liberal organization that has a selective view of the First Amendment. I happily accepted the invitation to defend our First Amendment right to decide for ourselves the fairness of what we hear.