02 The Daily Read, Part 1:

Reading up on the history of the Fairness Doctrine… this is a wikipedia entry that is pretty comprehensive and relatively neutral…

… after reading the wikipedia article, a couple of impressions…

• in general, liberals are for it, conservatives are against it… this makes sense in that a liberal society is more open to hearing opposing points of view and new information…
• conservative arguments are centered around issues of free speech and private property…
• the conservative theory is, that with the proliferation of information outlets it is not needed to provide access to opposing points of view…
• newspapers have never been subject to such regulation, the argument then is, why should other forms of media be?…

… personally, i believe the current media environment has allowed markets to be served by a prevailing and one sided point of view and that social media giants have ensured the siloing of populations into one sided media presentations of information and issues… the result is a public unable to debate the issues in a meaningful way, and therefor subject to demagoguery and division of and by politicians… it’s very unhealthy for the republic as we are witnessing…

… free speech is an important value, but it is also an important value that the public be well informed about the various sides of any issues and that a full spectrum of information be at least in front of them… current media market domination and social media algorithms that drive the public into silos is counterproductive and needs to be regulated… whether a new Fairness Doctrine can do that, or something more fine tuned to the present information acquisition environment is needed is a question for experts… that something is needed is beyond question…