Talking Back

...As Fred W. Friendly, former president of CBS News and lately both a Ford Foundation consultant and a journalism teacher at Columbia University, puts it in his new book, The Good Guys, the Bad Guys, and the First Amendment, "It may turn out that the licensing of those [television and radio] franchises will force them to be so responsive to government agencies that what is left cannot truly be called journalism...

...The Federal Communications Commission has never enforced the "controversial issues" requirement but has in recent years turned so balance-happy on the matter of "opposing viewpoints" that it has overinvolved itself in decision-making processes which belong to broadcasters...

...The FCC has begun to intimidate broadcasters out of doing their job and has helped keep the "balance" in broadcast journalism where it is now, at ground zero—thus, the "blandness doctrine" under which controversy in broadcasting is kept even-handed by keeping broadcasting uncontroversial...

...The small picture is a view of the Fairness Doctrine...

...Unfortunately, Friendly's training serves him badly...

...But, as Friendly has quipped, there are episodes of I Love Lucy on which the sun has never set, and when CBS deemed one of them more air-worthy than the Fulbright Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Vietnam, Friendly dipped into his personal "Go-to-Hell Fund" and left the news business as honorably as he had practiced it...

...Friendly writes here that "one of the earliest lessons I learned as a documentary producer was to keep the focus narrow, to use the 'little picture' to illuminate the whole...

...Friendly traces the bureaucratic evolution of the Fairness Doctrine back even before the birth of the FCC (whose criteria for renewing licenses is simply language lifted from the Transportation Act of 1920) to the 1960s, when Congress gave the FCC legal recognition and it began enforcement with concrete orders in support of the "right of reply," until the stage was set for the seminal Red Lion case, which dominates practically half of Friendly's book...

...They could not anticipate the discovery of the ionosphere and the finite number of airwaves in it for Twentieth Century communications...

...In his book, Friendly uses a fairness doctrine of his own as a compass...

...Kevin McAuliffe is a free-lance writer living in New York...

...All television and radio stations in this country, when they get their monopoly for a spot on the dial, make a semi-Faustian bargain with the Government which gives that spot to them: Under pain of losing their "license to print money," they are subject to a so-called Fairness Doctrine requiring them "to devote a reasonable amount of broadcast time to the discussion of controversial issues" with "reasonable opportunity for opposing viewpoints...

...Friendly calls this "tragic," and he should know...

...by clinging to his smaller picture, he never sheds enough light on the larger one, and as a result his book is an unqualified disappointment...

...After that case, Friendly reviews several actions which demonstrate the FCC's haphazard enforcement record and the broadcasters' own vulnerability...

...He is often hard to follow and is prone to pursue tangents instead of presenting a conceptual overview to connect his many themes...

...Not only does he glide over some vital issues (such as the family-hour lawsuit and possible Justice Department antitrust action against the networks), but he saturates the reader with undigested information...

...At CBS, often in collaboration with Edward R. Morrow, he gave the medium of television some of the greatest moments it ever had, such as the See It Now devastation of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Harvest of Shame, and Biography of a Bookie Joint...

...In this inquiry, the larger picture is broadcast regulation and the quality and freedom of radio and television news in America...

...KEVIN McAULIFFE When James Madison and the framers of the First Amendment decided that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging . . . freedom of . . . the press," they meant the right of every would-be printer, publisher, and press lord to compete in the marketplace—of ideas and of capitalism—and survive, if possible, with no control over content and no license from the Government...

...For example, the FCC revoked the Reverend Carl Mclntire's license but renewed that of a racist-minded Mississippi television station until an Appeals Court overruled it...

...Only at the book's end does Friendly recommend his own formula for reform: He believes that the broadcasting industry should set up an op-ed page of the air, that the FCC should stress the first part of the Fairness Doctrine and press for more hardhitting broadcast journalism, and that both the FCC and the industry should, over the long haul, be looking toward cable television, with its ability to open up many new channels and obviate the entire Fairness Doctrine debate...

...Friendly stays with that case, from its roots in a Kennedy-Johnson and Democratic-orchestrated campaign to demand and get free reply time as a lever to silence right-wing radio commentators, until the Warren Supreme Court decision that journalist Fred J. Cook was, after all, entitled to $7.50 worth of free time and that the Doctrine was constitutional...