The Max Frankel Fairness Doctrine

Now, this is a revolutionary idea:-

As a political reporter and editor, I concluded long ago that efforts to limit campaign contributions and expenditures have been either disingenuous or futile. Most spending caps are too porous...the public has overwhelmingly rejected the use of tax money to subsidize campaigning. In any case, private money that wants to buy political influence tends to behave like water running downhill: it will find a way around most obstacles...[and] big money is now able to find endless new paths, channeling even tax-exempt funds into political pools.

There are no easy ways to repair our entire election system. But I believe that a large degree of fairness could be restored to our campaigns if we level the TV playing field. And given the television industry’s huge stake in paid political advertising, it (and the Supreme Court) would surely resist limiting campaign ads, as many European countries do. With so much campaign cash floating around, there is only one attractive remedy I know of: double the price of political commercials so that every candidate’s purchase of TV time automatically pays for a comparable slot awarded to an opponent. The more you spend, the more your rival benefits as well. The more you attack, the more you underwrite the opponent’s responses. The desirable result would likely be that rival candidates would negotiate an arms control agreement, setting their own limits on their TV budgets and maybe even on their rhetoric.

But how could we enact such a double-fee-for-fairness rule?

Ideally, Congress would make it a law, calling it a tax for democracy and daring the Supreme Court to strike down a scheme that actually produces more speech. But would incumbents in Congress really vote to give their challengers a fairer shot? Probably not.

So the next best thing would be for the Federal Communications Commission to use its power over the airwaves and the TV spectrum to impose the double fee scheme. It would be an economic revival of the Fairness Doctrine and Equal Time Rule that once governed political expression on the air. Congress struck them down and could again object, but now it would be visibly undermining a conspicuously fair reform.

Something to think about.

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