The Fairness Doctrine: Benefits and Costs

Abstract

IT HAS BECOME fashionable in Washington to examine government programs in terms of effectiveness, which is, roughly speaking, an analysis of the immediate and long-range costs of a particular program balanced against hypothesized immediate and long-range benefits, particularly when compared with alternatives. Because it is almost axiomatic in the legal sense that every piece of legislation or regulation has its cost, it is particularly appropriate to apply the notion of cost effectiveness to the decisions of regulatory agencies in such fields as transportation, finance, and communications. A case in point is the fairness doctrine. The fairness doctrine is not new; it has its roots in the speeches of Herbert Hoover and in decisions of the Federal Radio Commission as early as 1929.1 In essence, the fairness doctrine requires that when a broadcaster allows his facilities to be used for the presentation of one side of a controversial issue, he must see that other (contrasting) viewpoints are presented as well. This so-called general fairness doctrine was formally promulgated by the Federal Communications Commission in 1948 in its Report on Editorializing by Broadcast Licensees.2 The fairness doctrine remained a matter of general policy, applied on a case-by-case basis, until the summer of i967 when the Commission adopted as rule certain provisions of the doctrine which have become the subject of extensive litigation; the issues were decided just six months ago by the United States Supreme Court in a unanimous decision, and the Commission's new rules were thereby upheld. It is the purpose of this article to examine those new rules from the standpoint of cost effectiveness.