Why the Fairness Doctrine is Unfair to the Left

"Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."
- Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 04 March 1801

"So let's leave it alone, 'cause we can't see eye to eye.
There ain't no good guys, there ain't no bad guys.
There's only you and me and we just disagree."
- From "We Just Disagree" by Billy Dean

The absolute worst laws are passed as a quick response to a crisis. In a heightened sense of urgency, lawmakers are willing to pass some extreme, simplistic solution whose faults become apparent only after the crisis has passed. The 9/11 attacks gave us the PATRIOT act and the TSA, and our civil liberties have suffered ever since. In 2008, the housing bust was addressed with two complex, obscenely expensive and hastily composed programs, the stimulus package and TARP. These programs did not prevent a severe economic downturn, and will be paid for by generations born long after this crisis has passes.

Which brings us to the latest crisis: the tragic shooting in Tucson, Arizona of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others. The instant analysis of the shooter's motivation was that it was a product of a harsh political environment. This has lead two Democratic representatives, Rep. Jim Clyburn (SC) and Rep. Bob Brady (PA), to propose reinstating the fairness doctrine. This FCC policy, first instated in 1949 and dropped in 1987, required broadcasters to present controversial issues of public importance in way that the FCC board finds to be honest and balanced. Supporters argue that a revived fairness doctrine would keep Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Bill O'Reilly off the air, resulting in a more civil political discourse.

Hopefully, cooler heads will prevail and the fairness doctrine will remain dead. The history of this doctrine indicates that it leads to ersatz censorship, and that it is especially unfair to the left. The problem with the fairness doctrine is that FCC officials of the current administration determines what is "honest and balanced" coverage, and inevitably their definition of balance reflects the administrations' point of view. The temptation to abuse this doctrine is hard to resist; Arthur Larson, a Democratic official from the JFK / LBJ years, admitted to using the doctrine to suppress right wing broadcasters. Larson regretted this censorious use of the FCC, especially after Richard Nixon used the fairness doctrine to suppress his critics. Shows such as "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" and the TV documentary "The Selling of the Pentagon" came under FCC scrutiny for their perceived left tilt. The liberal publications of that time (e.g. The Nation or Ramparts) decried the fairness doctrine on free speech grounds.

The democrats may control the FCC for now, but political fortunes can change on a dime. Remember back in 2004, when the Democratic party was given up for dead? In 2008, a mere 4 years later, political pundits declared that the Republicans would be a political minority for at least a generation. Then came the 2010 elections, and the tables turned once again. Who knows which side will control the FCC in 2013? Keep in mind that an FCC with the power to boot Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and Bill O'Reilly off the air also has the power to silence Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, and Rachel Maddow.

The fairness doctrine unfairly favors the status quo over the agents of change. Liberal support for this doctrine is therefore self defeating. We should not use this crisis to weaken our first amendment protections.

Defending Keith Olbermann and Media Bias

"He would certainly rebuke you if you secretly showed partiality!"
- Job 13:10

"Think of what you're saying.
You can get it wrong and still you think that it's all right.
Think of what I'm saying,
We can work it out and get it straight, or say good night."
- from "We Can Work It Out" by Lennon and McCartney

MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann was recently given a two day suspension for donating money to three democratic congressional campaigns. His NBC contract stipulates that he would not engage in such partisan activities with notifying the president of NBC news, and obtaining this president's approval. NBC requires this of all of their news staff in order to maintain their "journalistic impartiality".

I may be the worst person in the world to defend Olbermann. I find that like all too many cable news hosts, Olbermann frequently goes on sophomoric and tiresome rants. His attacks on Scott Brown, Michelle Malkin, and Bill O'Reilly were so over-the-top that they generated sympathy for his targets.

So why shouldn't NBC take punitive measures against Olbermann for violating his contract? Basically, because this contract requirement of impartiality, even in his off-air activities, makes no sense in the current media world, for at least three reasons.

1. Olbermann does not does not host a show like the NBC nightly news where he is expected to be impartial. He hosts the video equivalent of a newspaper Op-Ed piece, where he is expected to give his opinion. How can he give his opinion and be impartial at the same time?
2. It is questionable whether journalistic impartiality is a realistic goal. A study published in the Journal of Political Economy finds a slant in many 'balanced' news reports, due to the nature of the news business.
   
3. When the national TV market was an oligopoly of three major networks, impartiality was a major concern. But with the explosion of news outlets on TV and the internet, we have a much better way to get both sides of a story. We can watch both a true liberal and a true conservative present their case. This is a vast improvement over having a single new anchor present his or her sincere point of view, and then for balance, present some alternative that he or she does not really believe in.

Keith Olbermann, Bill O'Reilly, Chris Matthews, and Glenn Beck may all say things that you disagree with. Certainly they have said things that I object to. But their contributions to the public dialog allows viewers to more clearly see issues from both sides of the left-right divide.

Speaking of the left-right divide, I heartily recommend the web site Blogging Heads TV. This site has videos of bloggers from differing sides debate each other over a web cam. You will be pleased to see how polite these bloggers are. They have mastered the art of disagreeing without being disagreeable. Another pleasant surprise is how often they come to agreement!

Before leaving, I should point out one point on which I emphatically agree with Keith Olbermann: his brave stance on Anwar al-Awlaki. And for those who would like to take a break from serious discussion, here is a lighter side of Olbermann.

Government Greed

"Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions."
- Luke 12:15"

Money, so they say
Is the root of all evil today
But if you ask for a rise
It's no surprise
That they're giving none away"
- From "Money" by Roger Waters

In many an economic debate, you will find one participant who feels that all our troubles can be boiled down to one word: greed. You've heard this argument before: greed is what drives the profit motive, the basis of free market economies, and that this dependence on one of the seven deadly sins accounts for all our society's ills, including oil spills, stock market crashes, and lousy "Star Wars" sequels. If I had a dime for every time someone given this one word diagnosis, I'd be, well, a successful capitalist.

This one word critique of free market economics is quite emotionally satisfying, but it does not hold up to scrutiny for a number of reasons. The world economic environment is extremely complex, and one word diagnoses generally do not apply to systems more complicated than a food processor. The greed critique of the private sector also seems to make the assumption that, in the absence of profits, people behave in a less greedy fashion. But a number of recent news stories confirm that the public sector succumbs to greed at least as often as the private sector.

For example, many cities and towns use special cameras to ticket drivers who run red lights. These are there for our safety, or so we are told. But multiple studies have recently shown that red light cameras actually increases accidents. When drivers spot the cameras, they frequently slam on the brakes, and this causes more accidents than are prevented by the cameras. In fact, a Dutch city has discovered that they can decrease accidents by a re-design of their roads that does not use traffic lights at all. So how many cities have dropped the red light cameras in light of these studies? Whenever this question is posed to city officials, it is amazing how quickly the topic is changed from safety to how could we possibly replace the lost ticket revenue. So are these cameras used because of safety, or because of greed?

Consider the recent pay scandal in Bell, California, a small, lower middle working class suburb of Los Angeles. The median family income in Bell is only $30,504, but the city residents pay some of the highest property tax rates in the country. When city officials insisted that these taxes needed to be raised even further to keep the city solvent, investigative reporters looked from the L. A. Times looked into city finances. They found that Bell was dramatically overpaying its officials. The Bell police chief earned 33% more than the police chief of Los Angeles. The city manager's base salary was $800,000, almost twice as much as what we pay the president of the United States, and bonuses and other benefits raised his total compensation for last year to $1.5 million dollars. To the poor, over-taxed families of Bell, this looks like greed.

Another case to ponder: in 1992, Massachusetts passed a ballot initiative to increase tobacco taxes, and to use the additional revenue for tobacco prevention programs. Starting in 1993, the state had created an effective anti-smoking ad campaign. The most popular of these ads featured the saga of Pam Laffin, a young woman who was dying of emphysema. The ads traced her various diagnoses, her vain attempt to get a lung transplant, and finally her death that left her two young daughters without a mother. The ads had quite an impact: the number of smokers in the state dropped off faster than the national average. And yet, this successful ad campaign dropped less than a decade later.

Now why did the state drop a program that was actually helping smokers quit? Too expensive, of course. Forget the promise to voters that the tobacco tax money would go to tobacco prevention, the legislators decided that they had better uses for the money. Don't worry that the tobacco tax is highly regressive, for smokers are a politically unpopular group. When tobacco companies benefit from the unhealthful addiction of smokers, we call that greed. So when the state over-taxes these same smokers, why isn't that greed?

These and other examples of government avarice show that the public sector effort to eliminate greed is about as successful as the Puritan effort to eliminate lust. It's not clear if , greed is an integral part of human nature. It is not an issue of whether "Greed is good", the main point is that "Greed is". One virtue of free markets is that they harness greed to some positive ends. For all the moral posturing, It was greed that propelled the tremendous improvements in our PC's (Moore's Law), in our cars, and in our home entertainment (from LP's to CD's to MP3's, from VHS to DVD to Blue Ray).

So the next time you hear someone sanctimoniously boiling down a complex issue to one word ("Greed"), feel free to accuse him of one of the other deadly sins: sloth.

Homeopathy! Apply Directly to the Recession!

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
- Albert Einstein

"[Groucho] My diagnosis never fails,
I know just what to do,
Whenever anybody ails,
I'm sympathetic too,
My heart within me melts...
[choir] His heart within him melts...
[Groucho] No matter what I treat 'em for,
they die from something else."
- From "Dr. Hackenbush", by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby.

A close examination of seeming unrelated topics often reveal some surprising connections. For example, the other night I was looking at youtube videos featuring James Randi, the famed magician and debunk-er of pseudoscience. One of Randi's more popular videos was his explanation of homeopathy, a form of medical quackery that produce the headache medicine Head-On, promoted by one of the most annoying TV commercials of all time. One of the basic principles of homeopathy is the law of similars, which holds that substances that cause healthy people to get symptoms can cure diseases that have these symptoms. For example, a homeopathic cure for a headache would be based on a substance that would induce the a headache in a well person. Who knows, maybe Head-On would work better if its ingredients included a portion of the Head-On ad.

Dr. Stephen Barrett, expert on medical quackery, dismisses the law of similars as a form of "sympathetic magic" without any scientific basis. In the interest of fairness, arguments for homeopathy can be found here.

Both James Randi and Dr. Barrett make a convincing case that the law of similars is rather silly. But the very night I saw the Randi video, I read this Bloomberg opinion piece on the Frank-Dodd housing reform bill. The author of this opinion piece, mortgage finance consultant Edward Pinto, criticizes the bill's list of criteria for prudent underwriting for not including a required minimum down payment nor a good credit history. It is easy to see the political motive for this bill; there is considerable pressure to increase home sales. But wasn't the current housing crisis caused by watered-down lending requirements that caused homeowners to take on excessive risk? The Frank-Dodd bill is basically applying the law of similars applied to the housing market: the policies that produced a downturn in a healthy economy will reverse the downturn in a recession. This is economic homeopathy, and hence economic quackery.

Why do people fall for medical quackery? All too often, the victims of medical frauds suffer from ailments for which there is no remedy. That is a hard prognosis to accept, and hence patients will accept any other alternative, no matter how shaky its scientific foundation.

The same can be said about why voters fall for economic quackery. Many home owners desperately want housing prices to return to the level they were at the height of the bubble. But it is unrealistic to expect housing prices to go that high again, since they far exceeded the value of the house. The cold, hard truth is that there is little that can be done to avoid the economic pain caused by our past mistakes. And no, the pain will not be lessened by an application of Head-On.

For more on the causes of the recession, I strongly recommend the documentary "Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis". In order to understand how the current financial crisis came about, the film makers talked to those few economists who foresaw the housing bust. These same economists warn that our current financial remedies will lead to another, even worse crisis.

The Dismal Science, Gangsta Rap Version

"We are all Keynesians now."
- President Richard M. Nixon

"We’ve been going back and forth for a century
[Keynes] I want to steer markets,
[Hayek] I want them set free
There’s a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
[Hayek] Blame low interest rates.
[Keynes] No… it’s the animal spirits"
- From "Fear the Boom and Bust" by John Papola & Russ Roberts

Our anemic economy has dominated the news of late, and will almost certainly be the central issue in the November elections. In spite of record stimulus spending, we still have nearly 10% unemployment and sagging housing sales. The debate over this crisis centers around two economists of the previous century, John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) and Frederic A. Hayek (1899-1992).

• In the book "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money", Keynes argues that in times of economic downturns, government spending must increase in order to boost aggregate demand.
• Hayek, Nobel prize winner and author of the 1944 best seller "The Road to Serfdom", argued that excessive government spending could make things even worse by creating perverse incentives and blunting price signals.

Voters would greatly benefit from an understanding of these two great economists. Elites often lament that far too few voters have an appetite for scholarly treatises on topics such as economics, preferring instead to indulge in pop culture. How could Hayek and Keynes possibly compete with "Dancing with the Stars"?

What about combining economics with pop culture? This unlikely idea occurred to fledgling television producer / directors John Papola and Russ Roberts. Concerned about the current downturn, Papola felt that it was important to get these ideas to a wider audience. Papola and Roberts considered several popular culture renditions of the ideas of Keynes and Hayek, finally settling on a rap video. The resulting video, "Fear the Boom and Bust", has been views 1.3 million times on YouTube. It has been translated into Spanish, French, Japanese and Chinese. Economics professors across the globe have shown this video to their classes. The producers have received kudos from both noted Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky and rapper Kei$ha.

See http://www.econstories.tv for more about this remarkable video that demonstrates that popular culture can actually promote learning.

Taking The Pledge

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"I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
- Francis Bellamy, "Pledge of Allegiance" (original version)

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republicans for Richard Stands, one nation invisible, with liberty and just us for all."
- The "Pledge of Allegiance" as many school children remember it

Massachusetts state law requires that teachers lead their class in the "Pledge of Allegiance" every day. The courts have ruled that a teacher or a student's right to choose not to recite the pledge is protected by the first amendment of the constitution, so the law has fallen into disuse. Every few years, some sort of drive pops up to bring back the recitation of the pledge in schools.
Now an Arlington teenager is spearheading such a drive.

Most of the challenges to the pledge have been on religious grounds. The words "under God" were added to the pledge in the 1950's, raising establishment clause issues. In courts, defenders of the pledge have argued that these words do not favor any particular religion, since followers of any faith can interpret the phrase "under God" to be the god of their faith. This argument ignores the rights of atheists and agnostics, as well as those religions that are not centered around the worship of one deity. What would the phrase "under God" mean to a Buddhist, a Confucian, or a Taoist? And for a Hindi, which god does the pledge refer to?

Advocates of reviving the school-led pledge assure us that no student or teacher will be forced to take the pledge. But the history of the commonwealth of Massachusetts suggests otherwise. In 1984, Randolf high school senior Susan Shapiro, an orthodox Jew, objected to the pledge. She believed that pledging to an inanimate object (the flag) would be a form of idolatry. Her home room teacher berated Susan for her beliefs in front of the class. Later she found herself bullied by her fellow students, and her family started receiving anonymous threatening, and often anti-Semitic, phone calls. Eventually Susan received police protection. These were the consequences of a student declining to take a pledge that was promoted as "voluntary".

Although most critiques of school-led pledging center around religion, the strongest critique of this proposal, ironically, comes from the pledge of allegiance itself. The pledge concisely but eloquently expresses why our country deserves our allegiance in its final six words: "with liberty and justice for all". Our children should learn how valuable liberty is, how rare the freedoms we enjoy today are in human history, and why this nation's founders fought so hard for it. But what would witnessing fellow students being pressured to recite a pledge against their will teach a child about liberty?

All too often, these mass rote recitations of the pledge result in children mouthing the words without really understanding them - witness the generations of kids who thought the pledge had something to do with "Richard Stands". At its worst, this ritual can deprive a student of his or her freedom, ironically in the name of a pledge about liberty. Let me suggest an alternative: why don't we have our grade school and high school curriculum include one week where the students learn about liberty? Our schools should have an annual "Freedom Week" where the students will be taught how liberty played a vital role in virtual every subject they are studying, including history, science, music and literature. There are dissidents who have come to this country to escape repression who would make excellent "Freedom Week" lecturers. If we could really impress our children with the importance of freedom, they would gladly and voluntarily pledge to this country.

Black Gold And Red Tape

"A bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy."
- John Stuart Mill, "On Representative Government"

"Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress."
- James H. Boren, "When in Doubt, Mumble: a Bureaucrat’s Handbook"

The BP gulf region oil spill has released a sticky substance has rendered pelicans, crabs and sea turtle immobile. There is also something sticky that has immobilized those who should be responding to this crisis: Washington bureaucracy. Efforts to minimize the damage have been thwarted by existing regulations, mindlessly applied to a situation where they are clearly inappropriate:

• French oil skimmers offered to help with the clean-up, but were turned away because of the Jones act, a maritime protectionist measure that requires such work to be done by American labor;
• The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 prevents U.S. oil skimmers from other parts of the country from being dispatched to the gulf; and
• In an attempt to prevent the oil from reaching the shores, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal wanted to build sand berms, but that solution was delayed by the Interior Department over concerns whether the sand berms would comply with environmental regulations.

What is particularly frustrating about their application of these regulations to the golf oil spill actually undermine the original purpose of these regulations. The Jones act was intended to preserve American jobs, and yet its application to the BP spill endangers large numbers of American jobs. And sand berms, a low tech barrier made of sand and hay, may have some negative ecological impacts, but can anyone seriously argue that the berms would do more environmental damage than a coat of oil on the Louisiana shores?

In an interview with "Today" show host Matt Lauer, President Barack Obama said, in defense of the federal response to this crisis

"I don't sit around talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick."

The president caught some flack for the crudeness of his "ass to kick" remark. But there is a far more serious problem with this remark. Finding someone's ass to kick may be emotionally satisfying, but it does nothing to clean up the mess. To get this job done, the president should issue waivers to some of these regulations that are hampering the needed rapid response to this spill. Instead of asking whose ass to kick, the president should have asked "whose hands should we untie?"