

Fairness doctrine never applied to newspapers, magazines, cable television, podcasts, youtube channels, twitch streamers, and so on.
It literally only ever applied to broadcast television and broadcast radio. In other words, anyone using radio spectrum to broadcast their message. It applied exclusively to broadcast because businesses pay licensing fees for exclusive use of specific bands of the publicly available radio spectrum (naturally public I might add, literally anyone with the knowledge and tools can set up a radio tower which is why the spectrum is tightly controlled). Cable Internet is private infrastructure, the internet in general is hosted on private infrastructure, newspapers are built on private infrastructure, and so on. Under what arguments could we even use to regulate modern media in the same way?
It was abolished 9 years before FOX News (a cable tv station) existed.
I’m sorry but I get tired of this canard that if only we had kept it somehow things would be better. We live in a world where it got repealed, so I have a hard time believing that if it had been kept around that it would have been sufficiently updated to cover other forms of media. I mean look at the fight over Net Neutrality, it’s a similar idea as the Fairness Doctrine, that all data should be treated neutrally and equally, ISPs shouldn’t have the ability to pick winners and losers in media reach and access. It has been gutted and no longer exists.
With all that in mind I find it so hard to believe it being kept around would have changed much about what is happening now. Hardly anybody even watches antenna driven over the air television anymore.












As is their custom and modus operandi.