Does Red Lion still matter?
As Fairness Doctrine history fanatics know, in 1969 the Supreme Court declared the policy constitutional. In the Red Lion case—a dispute between a radio station and a journalist who demanded his right to respond to an attack—the Supremes ruled that the FCC had statutory authority to implement the doctrine. It also ruled that because of the “scarcity” of broadcast frequencies, the First Amendment right of listeners to hear many viewpoints over the public airwaves outweighed the rights of the license holders themselves. But by the mid-1980s, the Commission was ready to dump the doctrine. In short, the FCC argued that, with the onset of cable and other technologies, the scarcity concept no longer held the same weight it had two decades earlier. The agency also noted broadcasters who told the Commission that they avoided tackling certain issues for fear of Fairness Doctrine lawsuits. When an appeals court ruled that Congress had never specifically codified the Fairness Doctrine per se, the
