Lesson 6: The Fairness Doctrine and Public Media
150 Years of American Telecommunications: The Online Course
Join Section A for FreeA report from a federal agency told American broadcasters in 1949 to cover controversial public issues and to carry opposing views, and no Congress ever voted that rule into law. The same agency erased it in 1987, and the power it had formalized worked again in 2025 with no such rule in force. One claim held the rule up for 38 years: only so many signals fit on a dial. The Supreme Court used that claim to make a Pennsylvania station hand a critic free airtime, then told a Miami newspaper five years later that no law could make it print a word. Congress tried a second answer in the same era, federal money for programming advertisers would not pay for, and it voted to appropriate those funds one year at a time. Now, both answers are gone. Yet the standard underneath them still decides who keeps a license.
