Net Neutrality and the Fairness Doctrine

In order to speak about what I want to during the extraordinary and utterly insane times of this presidential election, several apparently disconnected points must first be made in order to build up a semblance of neutrality and approach a point. That is to say, this post is for now a dump of disconnected points and links that I'll probably come back to later.

First, let us attempt for a moment to aggregate the critiques of fair journalistic practices coming from both the right and left by positing that "the mainstream media" (MSM) refers to all televised news (ignoring on the right both support of Fox News and critique of the New York Times), while online journalism--not only the blogosphere but not the whole of the internets either--can be posited as an entity over and against the MSM (ignoring critiques on the left of talk radio). I apologize for being so reductive, but it appears these are the lengths one must go to to make sense of things.

Second, in order to get at the structure of this momentary fiction I am setting up as new media journalism, an entity existing over and against the MSM, we should recall the recent comments by Geert Lovink on the profitability of distributing digital information: "venture capitalists openly admit there is no money to be made in content. The business plans that make sense are not so much content creators as aggregators and filters" (from Zero Comments, p. xxvi). However, content aggregators have become not only the most profitable business model for Web 2.0--to the point where some now speak of the content economy becoming the 'link economy'--but content aggregators have become the mouthpiece of choice for both the far right and far left in a network environment: Drudge Report and Huffington Post, respectively, to the point of total saturation. Many more could be named, and even old media are now beginning to test the waters of link journalism.

Third, this past month FCC commissioner Robert McDowell stated that the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine--which many prominent Democrats (including Sen. Obama) have been advocating--cannot rightfully be considered apart from arguments pushed by the same Democrats for the institution of net neutrality legislation. The Fairness Doctrine, in effect between 1949 and 1987, required FCC licensed broadcasters to "to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was honest, equitable, and balanced."And the net neutrality movement has been pushing legislation to forbid any bandwidth restrictions by internet providers on its subscribers based on their network usage.

McDowell argues that several mental backflips are required to reconcile simultaneous support for the Fairness Doctrine and net neutrality--how can one advocate limits on journalistic content while arguing for complete removal of controls on the reception of content? The debate over the Fairness Doctrine has been framed on the right as a full on assault on the freedom of speech. Check out the forums on the news aggregator Digg on this article, "Liberals Poll Against Free Speech". And I must admit, I think twice every time I reflexively go to click "bury" on comments such as, linuxdad: "Talk radio will move to web a place where the FD [fairness doctrine] can't touch them. The reason to squelch free speech is that you do not have the balls to handle what they say, or argue against it." (my citation of this comment has omitted its racist undertones and threats of a populist revolution if Obama is elected)