Last week, Garland Robinette vilified the 47 percent of polled Americans who say that the Fairness Doctrine should be restored to force broadcasters to create more balanced programming on issues. His facile argument was that content should only be regulated by free market principles (podcast here, here, here, and here).

Robinette seems to hold to the mistaken view that ignorance is the same as balanced coverage, monotonously blathering on as a self-proclaimed expert on a mere handful of issues, and providing elementary information while labeling his show a “think tank.” Oddly enough, this a perfect model for a right-wing media corporation which wishes to perpetuate its domination of the New Orleans market with six radio stations, two of which broadcast identical content — 870 AM/105.3 FM, one of which is a superstation that can be heard throughout the South (870 AM) — while presenting a false impression of erudite balance. If you agree with Garland, he’ll praise you as being someone who, like him, has a “different” outlook. If you say something contrary, he’ll cut you off, re-assert his non-partisanship, and then launch back into a repetition of the same ideological point over and over again.

I’d like to know if Garland Robinette could even provide a functional definition of his favorite word: “socialism.” Any time someone suggests that citizens in a democracy should have a say in anything as important as control over information dissemination, Robinette attempts to inoculate himself from criticism by vaingloriously claiming himself to be non-partisan before saying that anything which served the community instead of a base profit motive would interfere with the unfettered, unregulated power of corporations.

Robinette repeated the “socialist” epithet when a caller suggested that the FCC be virtually abolished, and that in its place, communities would be given the right to vote every two years during congressional elections to reassign one station which isn’t serving the public interest. In issuing that “socialist” ephithet, Robinette overlooks the fact that his station’s owner doesn’t really operate in a “free” market.

Garland doesn’t seem capable of holding a lot of ideas inside his pea brain. Latch on to a new idea, and Garland disposes of another idea. Case in point, while criticizing government regulation of broadcasters, Garland seems to have forgotten that his employer, Entercom, is itself a beneficiary of government regulation. The Federal Communications Commission assigned the broadcast license which Garland enjoys to disgorge his ignorance while tamping down truly alternative viewpoints.

Is Garland Robinette dumb, or just lazy? In the end, it doesn’t matter. The result is the same. WWL and Garland Robinette abuse the notion of balanced discussion by passing off a right-wing ideology as non-partisan.

It wouldn’t have been difficult for Robinette to educate himself about some basic features of broadcast regulatory history and the rationale behind the Fairness Doctrine — a rudimentary discussion for most of us, but something which a man should know who commonly flatters himself for working in the business more than thirty years.

The first thing Garland needs to understand is that broadcast media is different from print or Internet. The difference — and it is an exceptional difference — is scarcity. Nothing in the Constitution prevents anyone from publishing anything they wish in print or on the Internet. The Supreme Court has ruled on standards of pornography, defamation, and calls to harmful action, but otherwise, you can say whatever you want to. These days, it’s easy to print something up, copy it, and distribute it. It’s even easier to post something on the Internet, or for the more ambitious, to start a blog.

Broadcasting is different because you first have to obtain a license from the FCC.

Why?

Consider what would happen if anyone could start a radio station using any frequency they chose. I would make Entercom’s 105.3 FM my first choice, and knock Garland Robinette off the air with a higher power output. Anyone who wanted to could set up a transmitter in a back yard and start broadcasting. The radio spectrum would fill up, and interference would be created as multiple broadcasters tried to compete for the same frequencies. In fact, this is what did happen before the first comprehensive set of federal regulations were established in 1927 to create order out of chaos. Literally, any corner department store that wanted a radio station to advertise sales just started one, creating interference across the spectrum.

It’s precisely because of broadcasting’s limited spectrum that regulation is required. Again, this is a very different situation from print or Internet where there the 1st Amendment guarantees the right to disseminate a message. The right to broadcast isn’t the same as the right to free speech. Inherently, the right to free speech can’t be asserted in an environment where there’s physical scarcity.

The FCC was created to establish order in the radio spectrum. The process by which the FCC chose to limit broadcasters was the licensing system. Because some people would have to be denied to right to broadcast, the FCC required that broadcast license recipients serve the public interest. Those who didn’t serve the public interest might, theoretically, have their license renewals denied. In practice, the number of broadcasters who have lost their licenses can be counted on one hand, because the FCC is toothless in enforcing regulations, and it tends to support what has become the status quo environment of major private, religious, and yes, public (i.e., NPR), corporations dominating the airwaves.

Obviously, a definition of “public interest” is difficult to agree upon. That’s why the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the principle of the Fairness Doctrine in RED LION BROADCASTING CO. v. FCC, 395 U.S. 367 (1969). Upholding a law suit by a plaintiff who asserted his right to respond to a personal attack, Justice Byron White ruled:

A license permits broadcasting, but the licensee has no constitutional right to be the one who holds the license or to monopolize a radio frequency to the exclusion of his fellow citizens. There is nothing in the First Amendment which prevents the Government from requiring a licensee to share his frequency with others…. It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.

One of Garland’s whining gripes is a misconception. He seems to think that the application of the Fairness Doctrine would require bureaucrats sitting in a dark room somewhere listening to the radio or watching TV and telling stations what to broadcast in every instance in which a political opinion is expressed. It would be laughable if it weren’t such a pathetically stupid notion. The Fairness Doctrine only required broadcasters, when they renew their licenses, to report their efforts to seek out and address issues of concern to the community — “to afford reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views on issues of public importance.” The FCC offered wide latitude in the application of the Fairness Doctrine. Garland’s uninformed mind is prone to an imaginative, if completely erroneous, version of reality.

What the Fairness Doctrine intended to prevent was the creation of stations which crowd out any alternative viewpoints whatsoever — “Rush Radio”, for example, with no other differing viewpoints across the entire radio spectrum of dozens of stations.

Attempting to defend his position that the free market should determine broadcast content, Robinette offered that Entercom broadcasted progressive Air America Radio on 1350 AM for a year, but dumped the format because it didn’t make any money. He discounted the fact that over half the city of New Orleans is a Democratic market. No matter, to Robinette’s rigid perspective, that the population of New Orleans in 2006 was still half what it was pre-Katrina. Nor did it ever occur to Robinette how uncanny it was the that the Air America format was dumped the very next day after the Democrats won control of Congress in 2006. It also never occurred to Robinette the extreme handicap Entercom gave Air America by relegating the format to a little heard frequency on the AM dial with no marketing of the format on TV, in newspapers, on billboards, or on its other radio stations — as Entercom does for Garland’s own show, as well as the WWL format generally.

Considering Garland’s rigid bi-polar world view, and his willful ignorance of how the smooth functioning of the spectrum of economic activity requires regulation (recall the causes of the mortgage crisis), whether dumb, vain, uninformed, or overconfident, the result gets us to the same place — something we’ve seen and fought and spilled blood to fight once before — nations destroyed by the symbiotic, corrupt relationship between a rigid, ideological, authoritarian political structure benefiting from complete, brutal corporate control over the economy. Garland Robinette’s view of broadcasting is completely anti-democratic. I wonder if Robinette’s small imagination can extend into the future the long-term consequences of his ideological support for unrestrained corporate control over information dissemination. What are the private benefits and social costs?

Since Garland Robinette can only see the world in “free” market capitalist terms, without regard for the need to regulate private interests, the following description of fascism is instructive, describing how a fascist government operates for the sole purpose of privatizing profit, and socializing costs.

Fascism also operated from a Social Darwinist view of human relations. Their aim was to promote “superior” individuals and weed out the weak. In terms of economic practice, this meant promoting the interests of successful businessmen while destroying trade unions and other organizations of the working class. Historian Gaetano Salvemini argued in 1936 that fascism makes taxpayers responsible to private enterprise, because “the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise… Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social.”

Garland’s ignorance, combined with the domination of the New Orleans radio spectrum by a couple of corporations which aren’t even locally based, provides a convincing argument for a restoration of the Fairness Doctrine. A compelling argument could even be made that community access to the airwaves to allow for a balanced discussion of challenging issues is absolutely essential for disaster recovery.

WWL and its parent company Entercom do a disservice to the recovery of New Orleans by promulgating ignorant, rigid ideological views.