Please go back and read my posts, and tell me where I objected to Glenn promoting his book?

It's not there. That was someone else's rant.

The only reason I mentioned his books, is because he mentioned that his last one topped at Amazon and the NYT Best Sellers List. I was pointing out that he clearly doesn't need the MSM to promote his books.

Wow, all this defensiveness against a straw man bearing my name.

"Geez" is right.

True, but I also note that Tribune came very close to selling LA Times back to local private ownership, a move that was very popular with LATimes readers.

I don't mean to underestimate the problems facing newspapers, both in terms of the business side of things, and in terms of corporate editorial management/control.

But it seems to me that many are prematurely writing the obituary of papers generally, and I just don't see that as a foregone conclusion yet. I believe there is still a way to have a great newspaper be greatly profitable, and I still believe newspapers provide a product that simply cannot be replaced anywhere else in the industry, and that is content.

Fraud Guy says:

having seen the politicization of so many portions of the Federal Government under the current regime, I would dread how the Fairness Doctrine would be implemented under a similar administration.

They're standing civil rights law on its head. Should we just junk that, too?

Fraud Guy asks:

Would the best, first step be to lower the maximum market saturation under one ownership?

We need to do both, and more besides.

The notion that one should be done first assumes a sort of coherence to policymaking that simply doesn't exist now. The goal should be to press as many commonsense ideas as possible on as many fronts as possible. We've been drowning in nonsense for six long years now. There's no need to be stingy on the return of good ideas. Whichever ones we can get enacted first, those are the ones we should do first.

Paul Rosenberg,

I am not sure whether this is an issue shared by others, but having seen the politicization of so many portions of the Federal Government under the current regime, I would dread how the Fairness Doctrine would be implemented under a similar administration. (Of course, the flip is that depending on the market to equitably adjudicate the issue, when so much of the RW is subsidized, is also problematic). Would the best, first step be to lower the maximum market saturation under one ownership?

Glenn asks:

Does the explosion in the sheer quantity (and diversity) of opinion outlets affect your views of its necessity?

No. Although I did mention scarcity as a consideration, this has to be understood in context. The scarcity referred to is the fact that there is only so much spectrum to go around, and that one entity's use of it precludes any other entity's use of it. It's about the public resource (spectrum) itself, not about the existence of alternatives.

Furthermore, I would argue that there is a very good public policy foundation for cross-ownership prohibitions between broadcast media and any other form of media.

In particular, many cable networks were dependent on broadcast parents for their birth and/or survival early on. It seems morally perverse to say that a public trust can legitimately be used to promote the growth of an alternative that owes nothing back to the public trust which enabled it to come into being in the first place. Since it's a much harder sell to get people to support the notion of a Fairness Doctrine for cable, it seems sensible to sever the two realms. Unless, perhaps, the broadcast parents would be willing to abide by a Fairness Doctrine for their cable properties as well.

Glenn:

And though you jokingly refer to application of this doctrine to the Internet, why isn't that a real concern? The public/private distinction is clear, but is there really a principled way to argue that radio stations should have to provide a balance to Rush Limbaugh but that online liberal magazines souldn't have to give a forum to Michelle Malkin?

There is, and it comes from history. Radio stations exist as they are only because the government decreed it so. The spectrum as a public resource could have been disposed of in any number of ways. Licensing and programming could have been much more closely regulated, they could have been consigned to entirely separate entities. They could have been denied to any commercial entity. (As Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover believed that commercials should not be allowed on radio, because--unlike advertizements in a newspaper or magazine--one could not simply disregard them by directing one's attention elsewhere.) This is the foundation on which the government retains its right to regulate them for "the public interest, convenience and necessity."

Online magazines, however, are historical descendents of dead tree magazines, which have never depended on the government for use of a public resource, except for the use of the mails. There is simply no equivilent to the use of the mails and the use of spectrum. Indeed, political journals are amongst the most public-interested of all uses that the mails are put to.

Broadcast media could not exist without the use of public spectrum. But journals certainly could. Indeed, many journals have existed entirely out of the hands of government authorities. (Samizdat, for example.)

Thus, they are not creatures of the state, even though magazine postal rates can serve to make them beneficiaries of its largess--and that is the crucial distinction.

I'm already on record as thinking that the Fairness Doctrine is a genie that will never make it back into the bottle but I'd be willing to argue that the proliferation of cable channels would not have been an adequate reason to scrap it. Even though spectrum scarcity was less of a problem, the cost of admission to become a broadcaster was still sufficiently high (and of course the knowlege that cable operators on the local level were still government selected monopolies) still suggests that imposing an expectation of public service would still have been reasonable.

The internet is a different ball of wax entirely. Even though there is an informal heirarchal structure developing, the network itself remains peer to peer, and the cost of becoming a content provider is just the time necessary to create the content. Attempting to impose Fairness on such a structure would be ridiculous in the first place. As texting and e-mail and other viral forms of information tranfer flourish the idea of imposing ANY kind of control remains quite elusive.