tribalism

Seeking Protection from Those We Most Fear

A rock fight could be called by anyone, any time. Usually we made do with whoever was around. Sometimes, sentries ran around the neighborhood yelling, “Rock fight!” followed by, “by the island in the creek” or “in Jerry’s backyard.”

A rock fight could happen almost anywhere. In the street, we grabbed handfuls of stones and lobbed them in the general direction of the other side. In someone’s backyard, everyone scrambled to collect rocks before the first stone was cast. By the creek, we alternated between scooping pebbles from the creek’s bed and gathering bigger rocks to aim at specific people.

We didn’t count slate as a rock because, if someone got hit with scaled slate, it was almost certain they’d be seriously injured. Slate was illegal.

After people showed up, we somehow sorted ourselves into sides. Now and then, a girl said she wanted to sit out, and we told her that was okay, but we couldn’t protect her from stray rocks. After a rock fight started, sometimes somebody suddenly switched teams. If that happened enough, the two sides devolved into a free-for-all.

Now and then a parent objected to rock fighting, but most of them seemed to understand. After all, the Korean War ended only a couple of years ago and World War II less than a decade ago. They probably thought we were playing war so we would be ready for the next time.

I showed up but was terrible at rock fights. I was fattest and slowest and made an easy target. I was a lousy thrower because the only athletic thing I did was ride a bike. I was often hit, and I rarely hit anyone. Most of the girls were better throwers than I was.

One afternoon, someone called a rock fight between my backyard and Janet Zetwok’s yard. My yard offered the advantage of two easy-to-climb mulberry trees. From high up, you could butterfly rocks with little chance of anybody hitting you. The Zetwok yard offered the advantage that their house had recently been built, and in the process lots of rocks and oyster shells had piled up.

As usual, I got hit a few times but kept throwing. When a rock hit Janet Zetwok in the head, she screamed bloody murder. She didn’t bleed, but her scream made up for it. The throwing stopped. Janet claimed I threw the rock that hit her.

Usually when somebody said they were “hurt bad” in a rock fight, everybody came after the thrower of the hurtful rock. Nobody had ever claimed that I hit them until that day. I ran. The other kids ran in circles gathering rocks. I kept galumphing to the end of the block where a house was being built on the side of a hill. I maneuvered my way up the hill where I gathered tons of rocks. From the hill, I easily stepped onto the flat roof of the house under construction. I started alternately jumping up and down and pacing, waiting for them to come.

The kids finally came, both boys and girls. They started hurling rocks and yelling names at me. Somebody was even scaling slate. But because I was up high, they didn’t come close to hitting me. I also had an almost endless arsenal. The rocks I threw back took wing and landed hard. I don’t know if I hit anyone, but after a while somebody yelled, “Retreat. Get reinforcements!” and they dispersed.

I snuck through the backyard of the house next door and continued down the street that crisscrossed the one I was on. I moved as fast as my fat little body would carry me. Two blocks brought me to the end of what we collectively called “the neighborhood.” Nobody went past that boundary, ever, unless with a parent and in a car.

But that day, I did.

At the end of the next block was the house where the “bad kids” lived. We weren’t aware of anything they’d done to qualify as bad. All we knew was: they were older, much taller, and darker-skinned, came from somewhere else, and had slicked-back black hair.

I knocked.

One of the “bad kids” came to the door. I told him all these kids were after me, throwing rocks at me, I was scared, and I needed their help. He disappeared and came back with one of his three brothers.

The three of us walked out to the street together. One asked where the other kids were. I said they’d be coming any minute. We walked back toward the construction site. Finally we saw the kids coming toward us, about the same number as before.

The kids stopped when they saw me with the two “bad kids.” We kept walking and met them in the middle of the street.

One of the “bad kids” asked, “You all throwing rocks at our friend, Jim?”

One of the kids said, “We were having a rock fight.”

The other “bad kid” asked, “What’s a rock fight?”

Another kid said, “We make teams and throw rocks at the other side.”

The first “bad kid” asked, “Do you really hit people with these rocks and hurt them?”

One of the kids said, “He threw a rock that hit Janet Zetwok in the head.”

The second “bad kid” turned to me and asked, “Is that true? Did you throw a rock that hurt someone?”

I answered, “I don’t know. I never hit anybody before. Usually, the rocks all hit me.”

Another kid said, “Hitting you is too easy, hoss.”

The first “bad kid” said, “Rock fights are a bad idea. You should stop. Jim here is our friend, you hear? Why don’t we all act like friends.”

Nobody threw more rocks that day.

As far as I know, none of us called the four brothers “bad kids” again, though some parents still did.

I started riding my bike as far as their house. Some other kids did too.

That I know of, nobody ever called me “Jim Ross, the big fat hoss” again.

I can’t say nobody ever called a rock fight again. Pretty soon, though, whenever somebody called a rock fight, nobody came.

***

Was my experience of rock fights unique to the community in which I grew up? Evidently not. I’ve talked to people who grew up in Illinois, Indiana, Texas, Florida, and throughout the mid-Atlantic region. Most boys experienced rock fights. One said he threw a rock that struck the town bully in the face and drew blood, so he ran as fast as he could, and escaped only by crossing the third rail. A woman who grew up in upstate New York said a girl in her neighborhood—struck in the head by a rock while observing a rock fight—suffered neurological damage and couldn’t live a normal life. A teacher friend in Belgium told me she recently had to take a girl hit in the head during a schoolyard rock fight to the ER.

The evidence suggests that rock fights were a near-universal experience in the United States when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. There’s some evidence it’s still going on, here and abroad. What others cannot speak to is the phenomenon I experienced first-hand of having the group turn on someone who seriously injured another. In effect, the punishment for having good aim, or of having an errant throw strike a participant and cause apparent damage, or of the group deciding to pin the blame on you even though you couldn’t hit the broad side of barn, was to have everyone gang up on you and, potentially, stone you.

When I tell my children about this, they say, “Did that really happen or are you making this up?” Yes, it really happened. I try to place it in the context of our living in the era after World War II and the Korean War. I suggest that perhaps we were we were trying to imagine being at war, leaving open the possibility that humans require an outlet for violence. My daughter asks, “Then how come people don’t have rock fights anymore?” My son answers, “Maybe we don’t get out enough. Or maybe we play video games instead. Or maybe bullying has gone digital.”

To some people, my story ends a bit too conveniently. The stranger, the “other,” the foreigner, the one whose differentness makes us afraid, becomes the mediator. However, that’s precisely what happened. Being overwhelmed by the numbers against me, and being a terrible rock fighter, I had nothing to lose by asking for protection from those we most feared. It turned out “the bad kids” were not only approachable and reasonable, they also found our normative ways of playing needlessly hurtful and, therefore, unacceptable. And by expanding the boundaries of the neighborhood to incorporate them, we stopped engaging in rock fights and, because we listened to them, we began to change. I believe that, by listening to and incorporating the stranger, the “other,” we became indivisible.

The notion that the four dark-skinned brothers were “bad kids” wasn’t derived from our experience as we weren’t allowed to have anything to do with them. It came from our parents. For whatever reason, our parents manufactured the belief that the brothers were “bad” and their family had to be avoided. But why? Perhaps it was simply that they didn’t know how to connect with people who looked different. And such manufactured divisiveness has stayed with us as shown in manufactured tension: red states vs. blue states, blacks vs. whites, born here vs. immigrants, documented vs. undocumented immigrants.

That experience and many others of the course of my 73 years have led me to conclude that the solution to feelings of opposition is to talk with the stranger whom we most fear. In the Trump era, that might mean talking with immigrants who are so often villainized. Of course, more often than not, the real stranger whom we have difficulty facing is our own shadow. And when that’s the case, the only long-term solution is acknowledging and incorporating our own shadow, thereby become personally whole and indivisible.

The Virus of Hate

by Jesse DeLong

Whether a Republican, Democrat, full-bore capitalist or new-age socialist, a person cannot watch “The Big Short” without coming to its ultimate question. Emerging from the theatre, jittery with soda and indignation and smacking the last morsels of Charleston Chew from her molars, a person wonders how so many financiers could have missed the signs of an impending crisis in the housing market. How could people who are paid to assess risk miss such a catastrophic doom about to tear through the world economy? As we all know, the housing market crashed on the verge of a presidential election. Similarly, as the last presidential cycle ramped up, a new catastrophe was befalling our nation: not a terrorist attack, not a rise in student-loan debt, not the persecution of religious liberty or a threat to safe and convenient access to women’s healthcare. No, the news shows had sounded the alarm about those calamities for the past seven years. However, like the bankers before, none of us saw this new tragedy coming: the sound-bite driven emergence of Donald Trump’s politics of hate.

While all the indicators of a financial crises hid in spreadsheets, so too did the foreshadowing of Trumpian politics burrow into the events of the past years. The most telling of these occurred around the fourth and fifth of June 2014. While not a single pundit has linked these days to the coming of Trump, the national conversation surrounding them sounded disturbing enough to mark a shift in the political landscape. A great fissure of hate and unreasonableness, which had simmered below—and occasionally bubbled over—the hearts of Republicans during the Obama Administration, had erupted fully, igniting not only the crazies, bigots, birthers and racists, but also the most practical and sensible minded in the party. At this time the Obama administration had announced its prisoner swap. Soldier Bowe Bergdahl, a deserter held in Afghanistan by the Taliban-aligned Haqqani network, returned to his homeland. In exchange, the administration released five members of the Taliban held in Guantanamo. The soldier’s homecoming was commemorated in the Rose Garden where the President received the soldier’s father, Robert Bergdahl, along with his mother, Jani.

Later, Chuck Todd appeared on Morning Joe to discuss the swap of Sgt. Bergdahl and the prisoners of war. While the panel discussed whether the swap represented a public relations move designed to rally sentiment around eventually closing Gitmo, Joe Scarborough held a photograph up for the camera. In the photo, the president has his arm around Bowe’s father as the two walk away from the camera. Robert had dressed for the ceremony, in khaki pants and a white, button-down shirt. He’d groomed his long hair into a ponytail. Consequentially, though, he also sported a long and bushy beard. As Scarborough displayed the photograph, he began to criticize the father. He referred to Robert, whose son had been missing for 5 years, as “a man who is reaching out to pro-Taliban forces.” While Chuck Todd, realizing that Scarborough meant to make insensitive comments, said, “Wait,” Scarborough, mad that anyone would interrupt him, responded, “Who would wait me here?” But Todd, who understood that none of us can fully know the grief and desperation of a parent whose son is held captive, continued, “Don’t criticize the parents.”

Even in our private homes, in conversations with loved ones, lulled by the comforts of ginger tea and a blanket shawled over our knees, the condemnation of this swap should be reserved for the government. Even if one believes that Mr. Bergdahl should have encouraged his son to remain with his platoon, this was hardly the moment to say so. These parents, after all, could finally let go of one of the greater heartaches possible for a father and mother to endure. But these aren’t ordinary times and even the most sensible of us can breathe in the swarms of hate emerging in our country.

Here are parts of the emails that Bowe sent to his father before deserting: “These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live… We don’t even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armored trucks… We make fun of them in front of their faces, and laugh at them for not understanding we are insulting them.”

Sensitive to his son’s conflicted morals, Robert wrote in reply: “Dear Bowe, In matters of life and death, and especially at war, it is never safe to ignore ones’ conscience. Ethics demands obedience to our conscience.” This is a line more likely to be written by Thoreau than applied to the modern American political landscape. Scarborough would have advised, presumably, “Stay with your troops. Continue to wage a war you think is unjust. Continue to enable a practice you think is reprehensible.” As Scarborough explained his superior parenting style to a man who had lost his son to a hostile enemy, he leaned forward, towards the camera, and raised his voice. His skin boiled red.

While Scarborough despised the Bergdahls, their actions weren’t the most loathsome to him. It took a more common act of kindness to incite Scarborough’s complete anger. While the rest of the show’s panel, ignoring Scarborough’s hateful tone, discussed Robert’s parenting style, Scarborough’s voice became more venomous. He began to describe, referencing the photo, how President Obama “put his arm around” Robert, as if consoling a grieving parent constitutes a detestable action. While other segments of Morning Joe had admittedly been devoted to criticizing the administration’s decision to release the prisoners of war, a good fifteen-minute chunk railed against two acts of love: A parent consoling his son and a president embracing a grieving father.

The day before, on The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly carried this nonsense even further. After seeing photographs of Robert sporting his beard, which he grew to mark the time his son remained missing, O’Reilly said that his beard made him look like a Muslim. O’Reilly didn’t mean Muslim in a good way. He didn’t mean Muslim in an objective way. He meant it in a racially-charged, us-vs-them, stay-out-of-our-country way. Responding to criticism he faced for his comments, O’Reilly said that looking like a Muslim was “inappropriate” when visiting the White House. While talking with Howard Kurtz, O’Reilly pulled back a finger for each point saying, “A: He absolutely looked like a Muslim; B: he talked Pashto, the language of the Taliban; and C: he thanked Allah. I thought the appearance was totally inappropriate.” Disgustingly, O’Reilly found it offensive that someone would speak the language of a Middle Eastern country, keep an unshaven face, and thank a god other than O’Reilly’s personal Christian savior while meeting members of the government in the Rose Garden. He might as well have yelled “White!” while saying the word White House.

Of course, racism, bigotry, and extreme nationalism have permeated politics for the entirety of American history. However, the extremist talk-show hosts or most radical elements of the Republican Party aren’t the only ones spouting out spite-filled hate. Joe Scarborough is a sensible commentator and (at the time was) a republican who works for MSNBC, a leftwing network. When shows on Fox News and MSNBC directed the same forms of anger at a grieving father and a consoling president, we should have been able to see that the country had begun to foster an ugliness that would replicate into the upcoming elections.

A little over a year later, a study by Sherry Towers and her colleagues would illuminate this sudden rupture of decency in American journalism. In July 2015, the journal Plos ONE released, “Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings.” According to Towers et al, massacres at colleges and other schools can be infectious for at-risk individuals and can incite similar incidents for up to 13 days after the tragedy. The article states that the media’s coverage of these events can temporarily infect our minds and cause copycat killings. Essentially, the media’s coverage of the event become a meme, a term coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene and defined by Pascal Boyer as “units of culture: notions, values, stories, etc. that get people to speak or act in certain ways that make other people store a replicated version” of the meme. Traditionally, scholars have criticized memetics, a school of thought that recognizes agency in ideas. Critics argue that the theories proposed by memetics and similar schools of thought are not validated by scientific data. However, more published studies like the one mentioned above are treating cultural phenomenon like a virus. For instance, mass media coverage of suicides can incite suicide in teens. While this is a relatively recent way of hypothesizing the interactions between culture and the brain, these findings reinforce Trump’s rise in the polls, as he manipulates the media by saying some of the most disgusting phrases in recent political memory. In turn, the media can’t help but share these phrases with its audience.

In the same way that the media’s coverage of mass shootings can replicate more shootings, the presence of hate at a Trump rally can incite more hate. The violence at Trump’s 2016 campaign rallies, where protesters were punched, kicked, abused, and called “sluts” and racist names, is self-perpetuating. The best example of this happened to Rose Hamid. Responding to Trump’s calls to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the U.S. 56-year-old flight attendant Rose Hamid staged a silent protest as Trump spoke to his followers. She wore a shirt reading, “Salam, I come in peace” and a star of David that resembled the symbol forced on the clothing of Jews during the Holocaust. Rose wanted to show that if people came “…to know each other, one on one, that they’ll stop being afraid of each other and we’ll be able to get rid of this hate in the world.” She was wrong.

Some of the supporters at the rally did get to know her and it didn’t matter. Briefly, they were nice. Hamid noted that those near her initially shared popcorn and talked with her. In the middle of the rally, though, she rose from her seat in silent protest. She didn’t shout. She didn’t interrupt. She remained quiet, respectful, displaying a tee-shirt with a Hebrew word on it. As a result, the crowd, giving in to what she would later describe as the “hateful crowd mentality,” became, frankly, Trump-like. The welcoming behavior of some, when confronted with the virus of hate, mutated into anger, disgust, and base fears. As security escorted her away, some apologized for the crowd’s treatment of her. Others, though, yelled “You have a bomb.” Many cheered. Hamid’s own explanation of it is fitting (click through to video): “It was really quite telling and a vivid example of what happens when you start using this hateful rhetoric and how it can incite a crowd where moments ago were being kind to me.” The contagious nature of the crowd’s hate infected those who moments ago were pleasant. Admittedly, it didn’t infect everyone. But not all viruses do.

Many commentators have and will argue that the anger we are witnessing is a result of Republicans enduring two terms of the Obama Administration and a congress so ideologically gridlocked that even the most optimistic citizens admit that barely anything is getting done. Other’s claim that a shift in demographics and the global economy have stranded working-class, white voters who are now terrified of their uncertain role in the U.S. Pundits will cite racially-charged violence and the protests from both sides, such as the chaos that ignited from the Michael Brown and Freddy Grey murders. They will tell of the suddenness by which Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and Ted Cruz rose to prominence and they will tell of the frequency by which those politicians boast of being an “outsider.” They will mention the collapse of the housing market and the failure of the past and present Administrations to prosecute any of those responsible. For sure, all of those observations are true.

After the Republican Primary debate in Vegas, Lindsey Graham said on CNN’s New Day, “To those people who think Obama’s a Muslim who was born in Kenya, I lost you a long time ago. There’s a dislike of Obama in my party that’s unhealthy, there was a dislike for President Bush in the Democratic party that was unhealthy. He is my President.” After Sarah Palin endorsed Trump, Rush Limbaugh described her speech and the grass-roots conservative movement as a “virulent opposition to the left and the Democrat Party and Barack Obama. And I, for the life of me, don’t know what’s so hard to understand about that.” In a piece in The Atlantic, conservative writer David Frum stated that Palin’s endorsement of Trump represented an “alliance of the aggrieved.” Similarly, while speaking in Iowa, Jeb Bush, a cordial and thoughtful man, admitted that he misjudged the Republican electorate. Speaking to the AP, he said, “This is dramatically different, because the country is dramatically different, and people are reflecting their anger and angst in a way that is very different than any time that I can recall.” Frequently belittled by Trump, Bush also misjudged something else. In the CNN Republican debates, speaking to Trump, he said, “You can’t insult your way to the presidency.” Given the current political climate paired with the contagious nature of hate, Jeb Bush was so, so wrong.

Of course, the events mentioned above factor into this reprehensible political moment we live in. Of course they do. But they are merely the environment from which the virus is allowed to spread. For example, if a group of people living together never washes their hands, shares food and uses each other’s unwashed spoons, one person getting sick will, more than likely, make most of them sick. But the acts of not washing their hands and not cleaning their silverware aren’t the virus; they are the virus’s accelerant. The analogy applies to our current political moment. Hate is the virus. Congressional ineptitude, demographic shifts, an exclusive economy (other than for a select few) and racial uprisings are just the grimy surfaces from which the virus spawns. As a result, we are missing a factor that could well be the main result of the spread of hate, which is that with the emergence of “click-bait” journalism, memes, shortened attention spans, and the networks’ need for ratings, the brain might be better wired to absorb and pass on anger than it does the complex inclusiveness of love.

Trump recognized this reality before anybody else. It’s no accident that he’s better than any of the other politicians at using Twitter, a program built of short, easily digestible phrases that spread rapidly. It’s also no surprise that he barely spent any money on television ads when all he had to do was say something hateful in order to rack up shares, retweets, and likes online. Similarly, it’s not hard to believe that the people who come to his rallies would become easily incited by his speeches. They’ve never washed their hands of the comforts of white privilege and they keep sharing the same spoon of ideological purity. Sadly, if this is the case, this Trump and the next one (because we will see many more “Trumps” in the future), represents the new norm in our political landscape. While this version of Trump will surely die out, as all memes eventually do, he will still mutate, take a new form, shape into a different candidate and politician. Hate as a common political commodity is here to stay.

Belief: An Open Letter to a Conservative Friend Seeking Common Ground

by Charles Entrekin

Dear Friend,

About belief, well, I think we’re making it all up. All of it. And we humans are good at it. Back in Nevada City, California, I made the acquaintance of Peter Collier, past Editor of Ramparts, recent publisher of Encounter Books, past left-wing activist, current right-wing activist, who, by his own testimony, was really out there on the far left, but then he changed his mind, transformed himself, and moved over to the far right. But he was entertaining and, as with David Mamet’s article in the Village Voice piece about his transformation from when he was a “brain dead liberal,” it was kind of fascinating to see “how he rolls.” Mamet’s article was too full of hyperbole for my taste, but, yes, “common ground” can be found, as he suggests at the end of the piece, around the company water cooler. Because that’s where we have to get along because we have to get some work done, and politics and religion are not about “work.” They are about beliefs. And beliefs, for me, turn out to be, maybe, matters of taste, or clever guidelines for controlling the populace (patriotism, taxes), or for acquiring power and riches (salvation from guilt, religious tithing), or, for some, like those who rendezvous in secret in public bathrooms, camouflage. And perhaps, after all, in the final analysis, beliefs are simply one’s “gang colors.” Furthermore, I might go on to suggest that beliefs are the verbal clothes we dress up in to justify our public persona, or perhaps conceal the hidden agendas we hide from ourselves. But they do not define a person. Good or bad behavior defines a person. Republican or Democrat, atheist or Catholic, good or bad people can be found wearing those “gang colors.” Which is not say that actions are not informed from beliefs, they are simply faux justifications. The sniper hiding out in the bushes in front of a birth control clinic, or the communist who spies on his fellow workers for the good of the party, or the suicide bomber who blows himself up in the marketplace, or the Christian racist who bombs a church and kills four black children, does not act from belief alone. People are, as Sartre might say, doomed to be responsible for their own actions, even when they did not understand what they were doing. It is an irreducible fact that no matter what society one lives in, and no matter what belief system one has adopted, one cannot escape from one’s own actions. And that’s the good news and the bad.

Warmly,
Charles

The Fairness Doctrine: How We Lost It and Why We Need It Back

by Steve Rendall

American thought and American politics will be largely at the mercy of those who operate these stations, for publicity is the most powerful weapon that can be wielded in a republic. And when such a weapon is placed in the hands of one person, or a single selfish group is permitted to either tacitly or otherwise acquire ownership or dominate these broadcasting stations throughout the country, then woe be to those who dare to differ with them. It will be impossible to compete with them in reaching the ears of the American people.

— Rep. Luther Johnson (D.-Texas), in the debate that preceded the Radio Act of 1927 (KPFA, 1/16/03)

It has been one hundred years of technological advancement and America is squarely in the information age. Yet it seems we have come full circle and we are now discussing the same moral and ethical public policy issues that we were discussing in 1927. How did we backslide into such divisiveness as a nation? Was our national goodwill hijacked for commercialization that completely polarized a nation? Why can’t the “red and blue” even talk across aisle any longer?

I was recently listening to a Sam Harris podcast in conversation with Ian Bremmer (Bremmer created Wall Street’s first global political risk index (GPRI) and is the founding chairman of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Geopolitical Risk). The podcast was about the failure of globalism and the distinction between globalism and globalization. For the discussion, Bremmer clarified globalism as a political ideology of free trade, open borders, and global security that has been promoted in the West by the political, corporate, media, and business leaders, guaranteed by the United States and its allies. By contrast, globalization is a positive and effective economic process—exchanging goods, services, and ideas around the world creating global wealth. The difference is that the former scenario attempts to establish a world order. Globalism is an ideology that has largely failed the American public because of the inherent elitism of its policies—corporations taking advantage of structural inequalities of wealthy and poor nations around the world for profit and exploiting its own citizens in propaganda-driven marketing. “America First” is simply a failed ideology. Harris and Bremmer discussed national and global inequality and explored the problems of an “us vs. them” media landscape. The controversy that swirled around the media, the First Amendment, and the Fairness Doctrine comes to mind.

The Fairness Doctrine (whose precursor was the Radio Act of 1927) was enacted into law in 1959 and repealed by Ronald Reagan in 1987. An attempt to reinstate it could not withstand Reagan’s veto in 1988. Since then, political monologues proliferate the airwaves. Could the casualty of undermining this doctrine, originally meant to support non-biased dialogue, be maximizing commercialization over the public good and turning the news into entertainment for profit-oriented businesses, rather than being a platform for important issues of a diverse American populace? Americans like to see themselves as cosmopolitan. But a citizen of the world can’t concurrently support a populist, reductionary agenda. Is polarization a direct result of cable news, which ultimately results in America-first reductionism? How much is data mining, targeted internet searching, and social media advertising is responsible for the “me-first” American ideology?–Ed.

The following article is an concise and articulate consideration reprinted from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (January 2005)

A license permits broadcasting, but the licensee has no constitutional right to be the one who holds the license or to monopolize a…frequency to the exclusion of his fellow citizens. There is nothing in the First Amendment which prevents the Government from requiring a licensee to share his frequency with others…. It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.

— U.S. Supreme Court, upholding the constitutionality of the Fairness Doctrine in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 1969.

When the Sinclair Broadcast Group retreated from pre-election plans to force its 62 television stations to preempt prime-time programming in favor of airing the blatantly anti-John Kerry documentary Stolen Honor: Wounds that Never Heal, the reversal wasn’t triggered by a concern for fairness: Sinclair back-pedaled because its stock was tanking. The staunchly conservative broadcaster’s plan had provoked calls for sponsor boycotts, and Wall Street saw a company that was putting politics ahead of profits. Sinclair’s stock declined by nearly 17 percent before the company announced it would air a somewhat more balanced news program in place of the documentary (Baltimore Sun, 10/24/04).

But if fairness mattered little to Sinclair, the news that a corporation that controlled more TV licenses than any other could put the publicly owned airwaves to partisan use sparked discussion of fairness across the board, from media democracy activists to television industry executives.

Variety (10/25/04) underlined industry concerns in a report suggesting that Sinclair’s partisanship was making other broadcasters nervous by fueling “anti-consolidation forces” and efforts to bring back the FCC’s defunct Fairness Doctrine:

Sinclair could even put the Fairness Doctrine back in play, a rule established in 1949 to require that the networks—all three of them—air all sides of issues. The doctrine was abandoned in the 1980s with the proliferation of cable, leaving citizens with little recourse over broadcasters that misuse the public airwaves, except to oppose the renewal of licenses.

The Sinclair controversy brought discussion of the Fairness Doctrine back to news columns (Baltimore Sun, 10/24/04; L.A. Times, 10/24/04) and opinion pages (Portland Press Herald, 10/24/04; Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 10/22/04) across the country. Legal Times (11/15/04) weighed in with an in-depth essay headlined: “A Question of Fair Air Play: Can Current Remedies for Media Bias Handle Threats Like Sinclair’s Aborted Anti-Kerry Program?”

Sinclair’s history of one-sided editorializing and right-wing water-carrying, which long preceded its Stolen Honor ploy (Extra!, 11-12/04), puts it in the company of political talk radio, where right-wing opinion is the rule, locally and nationally. Together, they are part of a growing trend that sees movement conservatives and Republican partisans using the publicly owned airwaves as a political megaphone—one that goes largely unanswered by any regular opposing perspective. It’s an imbalance that begs for a remedy.

A short history of fairness

The necessity for the Fairness Doctrine, according to proponents, arises from the fact that there are many fewer broadcast licenses than people who would like to have them. Unlike publishing, where the tools of the trade are in more or less endless supply, broadcasting licenses are limited by the finite number of available frequencies. Thus, as trustees of a scarce public resource, licensees accept certain public interest obligations in exchange for the exclusive use of limited public airwaves. One such obligation was the Fairness Doctrine, which was meant to ensure that a variety of views, beyond those of the licensees and those they favored, were heard on the airwaves. (Since cable’s infrastructure is privately owned and cable channels can, in theory, be endlessly multiplied, the FCC does not put public interest requirements on that medium.)

The Fairness Doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows or editorials.

Formally adopted as an FCC rule in 1949 and repealed in 1987 by Ronald Reagan’s pro-broadcaster FCC, the doctrine can be traced back to the early days of broadcast regulation.

Early on, legislators wrestled over competing visions of the future of radio: Should it be commercial or non-commercial? There was even a proposal by the U.S. Navy to control the new technology. The debate included early arguments about how to address the public interest, as well as fears about the awesome power conferred on a handful of licensees.

— Rep. Luther Johnson (D.-Texas), in the debate that preceded the Radio Act of 1927 (KPFA, 1/16/03)

In the Radio Act of 1927, Congress mandated the FCC’s forerunner, the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), to grant broadcasting licenses in such a manner as to ensure that licensees served the “public convenience, interest or necessity.”

As former FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson pointed out (California Lawyer, 8/88), it was in that spirit that the FRC, in 1928, first gave words to a policy formulation that would become known as the Fairness Doctrine, calling for broadcasters to show “due regard for the opinions of others.” In 1949, the FCC adopted the doctrine as a formal rule (FCC, Report on Editorializing by Broadcast Licensees, 1949).

In 1959 Congress amended the Communications Act of 1934 to enshrine the Fairness Doctrine into law, rewriting Chapter 315(a) to read: “A broadcast licensee shall afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of conflicting views on matters of public importance.”

It is the purpose of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of that market, whether it be by the government itself or a private licensee. It is the right of the public to receive suitable access to social, political, aesthetic, moral and other ideas and experiences which is crucial here. That right may not constitutionally be abridged either by Congress or by the FCC.

— U.S. Supreme Court, Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 1969.

A decade later the United States Supreme Court upheld the doctrine’s constitutionality in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC (1969), foreshadowing a decade in which the FCC would view the Fairness Doctrine as a guiding principle, calling it “the single most important requirement of operation in the public interest—the sine qua non for grant of a renewal of license” (FCC Fairness Report, 1974).

How it worked

There are many misconceptions about the Fairness Doctrine. For instance, it did not require that each program be internally balanced, nor did it mandate equal time for opposing points of view. And it didn’t require that the balance of a station’s program lineup be anything like 50/50.

Nor, as Rush Limbaugh has repeatedly claimed, was the Fairness Doctrine all that stood between conservative talkshow hosts and the dominance they would attain after the doctrine’s repeal. In fact, not one Fairness Doctrine decision issued by the FCC had ever concerned itself with talkshows. Indeed, the talkshow format was born and flourished while the doctrine was in operation. Before the doctrine was repealed, right-wing hosts frequently dominated talkshow schedules, even in liberal cities, but none was ever muzzled (The Way Things Aren’t, Rendall et al., 1995). The Fairness Doctrine simply prohibited stations from broadcasting from a single perspective, day after day, without presenting opposing views.

In answer to charges, put forward in the Red Lion case, that the doctrine violated broadcasters’ First Amendment free speech rights because the government was exerting editorial control, Supreme Court Justice Byron White wrote: “There is no sanctuary in the First Amendment for unlimited private censorship operating in a medium not open to all.” In a Washington Post column (1/31/94), the Media Access Project (MAP), a telecommunications law firm that supports the Fairness Doctrine, addressed the First Amendment issue: “The Supreme Court unanimously found [the Fairness Doctrine] advances First Amendment values. It safeguards the public’s right to be informed on issues affecting our democracy, while also balancing broadcasters’ rights to the broadest possible editorial discretion.”

Indeed, when it was in place, citizen groups used the Fairness Doctrine as a tool to expand speech and debate. For instance, it prevented stations from allowing only one side to be heard on ballot measures. Over the years, it had been supported by grassroots groups across the political spectrum, including the ACLU, National Rifle Association and the right-wing Accuracy In Media.

Typically, when an individual or citizens group complained to a station about imbalance, the station would set aside time for an on-air response for the omitted perspective: “Reasonable opportunity for presentation of opposing points of view,” was the relevant phrase. If a station disagreed with the complaint, feeling that an adequate range of views had already been presented, the decision would be appealed to the FCC for a judgment.

According to Andrew Jay Schwartzman, president of MAP, scheduling response time was based on time of day, frequency and duration of the original perspective. “If one view received a lot of coverage in primetime,” Schwartzman told Extra!, “then at least some response time would have to be in primetime. Likewise if one side received many short spots or really long spots.” But the remedy did not amount to equal time; the ratio of airtime between the original perspective and the response “could be as much as five to one,” said Schwartzman.

As a guarantor of balance and inclusion, the Fairness Doctrine was no panacea. It was somewhat vague, and depended on the vigilance of listeners and viewers to notice imbalance. But its value, beyond the occasional remedies it provided, was in its codification of the principle that broadcasters had a responsibility to present a range of views on controversial issues.

The doctrine’s demise

From the 1920s through the ’70s, the history of the Fairness Doctrine paints a picture of public servants wrestling with how to maintain some public interest standards in the operation of publicly owned—but corporate-dominated—airwaves. Things were about to change.

The 1980s brought the Reagan Revolution, with its army of anti-regulatory extremists; not least among these was Reagan’s new FCC chair, Mark S. Fowler. Formerly a broadcast industry lawyer, Fowler earned his reputation as “the James Watt of the FCC” by sneering at the notion that broadcasters had a unique role or bore special responsibilities to ensure democratic discourse (California Lawyer, 8/88). It was all nonsense, said Fowler (L.A. Times, 5/1/03): “The perception of broadcasters as community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants.” To Fowler, television was “just another appliance—it’s a toaster with pictures,” and he seemed to endorse total deregulation (Washington Post, 2/6/83): “We’ve got to look beyond the conventional wisdom that we must somehow regulate this box.”

Of course, Fowler and associates didn’t favor total deregulation: Without licensing, the airwaves would descend into chaos as many broadcasters competed for the same frequencies, a situation that would mean ruin for the traditional corporate broadcasters they were so close to. But regulation for the public good rather than corporate convenience was deemed suspect.

Fowler vowed to see the Fairness Doctrine repealed, and though he would depart the commission a few months before the goal was realized, he worked assiduously at setting the stage for the doctrine’s demise.

He and his like-minded commissioners, a majority of whom had been appointed by President Ronald Reagan, argued that the doctrine violated broadcasters’ First Amendment free speech rights by giving government a measure of editorial control over stations. Moreover, rather than increase debate and discussion of controversial issues, they argued, the doctrine actually chilled debate, because stations feared demands for response time and possible challenges to broadcast licenses (though only one license was ever revoked in a dispute involving the Fairness Doctrine—California Lawyer, 8/88).

The FCC stopped enforcing the doctrine in the mid-’80s, well before it formally revoked it. As much as the commission majority wanted to repeal the doctrine outright, there was one hurdle that stood between them and their goal: Congress’ 1959 amendment to the Communications Act had made the doctrine law.

Help would come in the form of a controversial 1986 legal decision by Judge Robert Bork and then-Judge Antonin Scalia, both Reagan appointees on the D.C. Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. Their 2-1 opinion avoided the constitutional issue altogether, and simply declared that Congress had not actually made the doctrine into a law. Wrote Bork: “We do not believe that language adopted in 1959 made the Fairness Doctrine a binding statutory obligation,” because, he said, the doctrine was imposed “under,” not “by” the Communications Act of 1934 (California Lawyer, 8/88). Bork held that the 1959 amendment established that the FCC could apply the doctrine, but was not obliged to do so—that keeping the rule or scuttling it was simply a matter of FCC discretion.

“The decision contravened 25 years of FCC holdings that the doctrine had been put into law in 1959,” according to MAP. But it signaled the end of the Fairness Doctrine, which was repealed in 1987 by the FCC under new chair Dennis R. Patrick, a lawyer and Reagan White House aide.

A year after the doctrine’s repeal, writing in California Lawyer (8/88), former FCC commissioner Johnson summed up the fight to bring back the Fairness Doctrine as “a struggle for nothing less than possession of the First Amendment: Who gets to have and express opinions in America.” Though a bill before Congress to reinstate the doctrine passed overwhelmingly later that year, it failed to override Reagan’s veto. Another attempt to resurrect the doctrine in 1991 ran out of steam when President George H.W. Bush threatened another veto.

Where things stand

What has changed since the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine? Is there more coverage of controversial issues of public importance? “Since the demise of the Fairness Doctrine we have had much less coverage of issues,” says MAP’s Schwartzman, adding that television news and public affairs programming has decreased locally and nationally. According to a study conducted by MAP and the Benton Foundation, 25 percent of broadcast stations no longer offer any local news or public affairs programming at all (Federal Communications Law Journal, 5/03).

The most extreme change has been in the immense volume of unanswered conservative opinion heard on the airwaves, especially on talk radio. Nationally, virtually all of the leading political talk show hosts are right-wingers: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Oliver North, G. Gordon Liddy, Bill O’Reilly and Michael Reagan, to name just a few. The same goes for local talkshows. One product of the post-Fairness era is the conservative “Hot Talk” format, featuring one right-wing host after another and little else. Disney-owned KSFO in liberal San Francisco is one such station (Extra!, 3-4/95). Some towns have two.

When Edward Monks, a lawyer in Eugene, Oregon, studied the two commercial talk stations in his town (Eugene Register-Guard, 6/30/02), he found “80 hours per week, more than 4,000 hours per year, programmed for Republican and conservative talk shows, without a single second programmed for a Democratic or liberal perspective.” Observing that Eugene (a generally progressive town) was “fairly representative,” Monks concluded: “Political opinions expressed on talk radio are approaching the level of uniformity that would normally be achieved only in a totalitarian society. There is nothing fair, balanced or democratic about it.”

Bringing back fairness?

For citizens who value media democracy and the public interest, broadcast regulation of our publicly owned airwaves has reached a low-water mark. In his new book, Crimes Against Nature, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. probes the failure of broadcasters to cover the environment, writing, “The FCC’s pro-industry, anti-regulatory philosophy has effectively ended the right of access to broadcast television by any but the moneyed interests.”

According to TV Week (11/30/04), a coalition of broadcast giants is currently pondering a legal assault on the Supreme Court’s Red Lion decision. “Media General and a coalition of major TV network owners—NBC Universal, News Corp. and Viacom—made clear that they are seriously considering an attack on Red Lion as part of an industry challenge to an appellate court decision scrapping FCC media ownership deregulation earlier this year.”

Considering the many looming problems facing media democracy advocates, Extra! asked MAP’s Schwartzman why activists should still be concerned about the Fairness Doctrine.

What has not changed since 1987 is that over-the-air broadcasting remains the most powerful force affecting public opinion, especially on local issues; as public trustees, broadcasters ought to be insuring that they inform the public, not inflame them. That’s why we need a Fairness Doctrine. It’s not a universal solution. It’s not a substitute for reform or for diversity of ownership. It’s simply a mechanism to address the most extreme kinds of broadcast abuse.