So the US does not have “truth in broadcasting” laws like Canada? Our counterpart to the FCC, the CRTC, would yank the broadcasting licence pretty quickly of any tv or radio station that was shown to be clearly lying. Losing your licence is stronger punishment than fines.
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Media has been decentralized quite a bit. FoxNews primetime viewership is only 2 million.
To put in perspective, the Kardashian-Jenner family has a combined 1.2 billion following (with Kylie Jenner topping the charts at over 300 million). And people spend way more hours on insta
They literally can sway any news if they wanted to.
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Comparing prime time viewership to Instagram followers is not quite apples to apples but the rest of your post stands.
No, we do not have any requirement that the media be truthful. And they aren’t.
The reality in our capitalist system is that organizations will do whatever they can to maximize profit. I therefore have no problem with reasonable regulations to protect the public.
Admittedly a large part of the news industry can not be policed by the threat of removing their broadcast licenses but surely fines for lying are at least possible for some of the non-traditional news providers. Doing something is better than nothing.
I do think that tv and radio news broadcasters do still have influence on voters and politicians despite their current historically low share of viewers. The threat of revoked broadcast licenses has worked well in Canada to hold them to the truth. As a result we do not have a Fox-like station in Canada since their business model involves lying.
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We did. It was called the FCC fairness doctrine and was in place from 1947 to 1987. It’s repeal is another legacy of the Reagan adminstration, who argued that requiring truthfulness was an infringment on the freedom of the press. Interestingly it was just an FCC regulation. All it took was a set of appointees on the FCC to roll it back.
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Wouldn’t have applied to Fox News, but NBC and CBS would have been subject to it.
I’m not sure what the penalties for blatant disregard for the truth were though.
The fairness doctrine did allow the FCC to yank broadcast licenses. I believe it was only actually used once: against a segregationist TV station.
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I was aware of The Fairness Doctrine in the US and was not surprised that it got yanked in the Reagan era. It was an even harder standard to enforce than telling the truth. Canada does not have a “fairness” regulation.
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Limited regulation, not legislation … and really, until I looked it up, I didn’t think it went this far.
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Interesting… did not know that.
I suspect many people don’t know about it…which perhaps says something about how much the FCC enforces that regulation.
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This is interesting. However regulation without enforcement is pretty useless.
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The current standard seems to be that you lie as long as the consequences do not cause financial harm or suffering and can be proven to be intentional. I’m not on the details of each case you listed but none of them seem like they fit that.
Alex Jones made money while making sandy hook parents suffer. That feels like it’s on a different level. 45m may not be the right number, but he did repeat this story many times.
Anyway, i think making something like an inaccurate claim a criminal offense seems difficult to legislate. I’m not saying we are exactly right now, but it seems like it could go really wrong going the other way.
NBC editing the 911 tape was clearly intentional and malicious and surely caused Zimmerman harm. That seems like a slam dunk to me.
I’m sure W could assert harm from the CBS forged documents but it probably wasn’t worth it to him to go after them.
Doesn’t mean they should get away with it.
Tucker Carlson knew he was lying and caused reputational damage to Karen McDougal. I’m not sure if/how it directly impacted her financially, but that is a preposterous standard to begin with.
Well we could start by looking at what Canada is doing with respect to requiring the media to tell the truth. And maybe even step up enforcement of the rule we already seem to have in place.
It’s not criminal charges, but it’s more than we’re doing now.
There is no arbiter of truth. Giving that power to anyone or any group amplifies the flaws of your chosen arbiter.
In a trial the judge does not determine which statements are true or false, fact or fiction. The judge holds the participants with opposing positions to the structure designed to determine as best as possible what is true or false, fact or fiction.
We need to strengthen the structure so it is easier to determine what is fact and what is fiction. I would suggest something like.
News
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Newscaster is a designation that has strict requirements regarding how and what they present. A newscaster cannot present opinion. This does not correct the problem of biased selection of facts to present or the quoting of someone else’s opinion. The benefit of the strengthened newscaster designation is it is easy for the government to fairly determine compliance and it is easier for the people to distinguish between some level of fact and fiction.
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A news program has to be at least 80% newscasters and the separation has to be clear and obvious. The use of standard watermarks on content would be an easy to implement and police control. This does not mean that most people will stop getting their news from non-newscasters. It does ease the burden for people determining facts from fiction.
What of John Oliver and Tucker Carlson. Removing Tucker Carlson out from under the news umbrella may reduce his credibility but I doubt it will reduce his popularity. I am highly suspicious of giving the government oversight of content. The problems I see with our current system are what if there is no deep pocket victim or clear victim, and how do we make the potential settlement/punishment large enough to discourage the behavior?
You can’t stop people wanting to believe falsehood. Otherwise churches would be illegal.