lies, damned lies, and the Trump campaign

Now we have Giuliani freely admitting that FBI insiders are helping the Trump campaign, and both the Trump campaign and Fox News admitting that the stories about an indictment of Hillary coming soon are complete lies. And neither the Trump campaign nor Trump nor his supporters give a damn. Instead they produce "opinion pieces" about how the "truth" is being covered up by the "liberal media".

Appalling isn't it?  "Truth" has become fungible, or at least open to interpretation and disposal if it doesn't fit in with your chosen narrative.  For the past twenty years viewers have been inundated with "alternate reality" masquerading as news, and it's polluted a whole generation's ideas about what veracity means.

Bring back the Fairness Doctrine.

The Fairness Doctrine wouldn't be of much help, I don't think: it does not apply to political candidates.

Even the "equal opportunities" rult is of little value, as "news" programs are exempt. Political candidates are, of course, also exempt from the "personal attack" rule.

The only thing that would save this country's political future, I think, is to delete the Republican Party and replace it with a far-left party. That is what we need to combat the right-of-center Democratic Party.

Somewhere between 44-47% of the country favors a far-right agenda (at least in part).

You'd be disenfranchising an awful lot of voters.

http://goproject.gop.com/

Fuck 'em.

Every time a survey is done asking people about their preferences in policies, the left-leaning and far-left policies are always preferred by a large majority.

The problem is that most people seem to be too stupid to connect a politician and his policies, even when flatly and frequently stated. Most people in this country vote from the gut rather than with the brain. And we all know that the gut is infested with bacteria.

_Howard wrote:

The Fairness Doctrine wouldn't be of much help, I don't think: it does not apply to political candidates.

It is not political candidates to whom the Fairness Doctrine needs to be applied; it is news.

The public needs to know, wait, let me rephrase that, news organizations need to know that their reporting -- in this age of Twitter and Facebook and Instant Messaging -- they need to know that verifying and cross-checking is not dead.  That accuracy is more important than timeliness.  That they have a responsibility, in using the public airwaves (that they lease from the public), they have a responsibility to be accurate.

The public needs to be able to trust what they hear on public airwaves (radio and TV), there needs to be a distinction between what gets on the internet (which is like Wikipedia, open to public pronouncements of dubious veracity) and what is on the public broadcast networks.  TV does not need to compete with the internet for speed of rumors.  It needs to be the voice of reason instead.

The chairman of the FCC needs to be a Cabinet post.

NoCoPilot wrote:

...in using the public airwaves (that they lease from the public).

Public airwaves doesn't include cable, i.e., Fox, MSNBC, CNN, etc.
As far as the leases, the first three networks got the leases for nothing, as long as they provided pubic service (news broadcasts). We are being cheated in that regard.

The FCC should not be a cabinet post as then it would be subject to tight political  control and there would be changes in doctrine and regulation with every change in White House occupation.

What you outline is the way things should be, but the old Fairness Doctrine is toothless. We need a new set of regulations that will actually accomplish something. And there we run into potentially significant problems. Who will decide what is acceptable? Obama? Trump? Goebbels?

NoCoPilot wrote:

You say cable networks do not use "public airwaves" and therefore would not be bound by the Fairness Doctrine

No, I did not. I said, "Public airwaves doesn't include cable..." in regard to leasing. I said nothing about not being bound by the Fairness Doctrine. Of course, no one is bound by it, so...

NoCoPilot wrote:

The license renewal process is where the power is.

But that only applies to OTA broadcasts, doesn't it?

I am not disagreeing with the idea that we need honesty in broadcasting, whether OTA or cable. I do not agree that the Fairness Doctrine, as written, is capable of doing the job.

I came upstairs to run through the news programs, see if anything happened today.

MSNBC was running Chris Hayes, standard stuff.  Flipped over to Fox, they were running somebody named Judge Jeanine Pirro, who delivered this absolutely BLISTERING denunciation of Clinton, claiming she was about to be indicted, that she'd been under constant FBI investigation since 1992, that she & her husband had made over $100 million from the Clinton Foundation (largely from foreign donors), yadda yadda yadda.  How Donald was the only candidate with the moral standing and clarity to lead the country.  After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I flipped over to CNN, who are playing "All Business: The Essential Donald Trump", a 2-hour special on his failed businesses, his duplicity, his lies, his shams and cons.  

Where is the Fairness Doctrine?

Talking about fairness.

https://www.freespeech.org/video/where-wall-wall-coverage-when-bad-guy-white

Was Jeanine Pirro presenting the news or editorializing? If it was presented as news, then the Fairness Doctrine would not have applied; it only required rebuttal if it was editorializing. Again, we need something much stronger than the Fairness Doctrine.

richard09 wrote:

Talking about fairness.

https://www.freespeech.org/video/where-wall-wall-coverage-when-bad-guy-white

Ain't that the truth?
Sad.

_Howard wrote:

If it was presented as news, then the Fairness Doctrine would not have applied; it only required rebuttal if it was editorializing.

You are confusing the Fairness Doctrine with the Equal Time rule. That's okay, many people do.

No, I am not. The Equal Time Rule applies to candidates.