The Radio Right and The Fairness Doctrine
Critics of social media’s monopoly power like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz might be surprised to learn that they have much in common with progressive broadcast reformers of the mid-20th century.
In his book The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement, Paul Matzko, Editor for Tech and Innovation at Cato’s Libertarianism.org, documents the fascinating history of how the “Fairness Doctrine” was used to undermine the free speech rights of conservative radio broadcasters. From the Kennedy until Carter, Presidents weaponized FCC regulations to target dissenting voices under the guise of the public interest.
As a long-time radio host and active user of social media, I want to see free speech flourish. Does that mean requiring radio stations to give equal airtime to competing points of view as the Fairness Doctrine required? Or forcing social media companies to host every conservative point of view on their platforms, as Hawley’s reforms would require them to do?
Perhaps today’s conservative crusaders against Facebook have the “free speech” argument backwards. I’d much rather live in a world where government has less power to regulate all media — whether traditional print, radio, or modern social media and podcasting.
Tune to hear Paul Matzko tell “The Sordid History of the Fairness Doctrine” and call in with your questions at any time during the show.
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Bob Zadek show, the longest running live libertarian talk radio show in all over radio, the show of ideas, never once of attitude. Thank you so much for listening on this Valentine’s day Sunday morning.
The theme for this morning show will be “beware of fair.” Fair is in general, a scary word — a word by which those withholding political power can hide and bury the most unfair of laws and policies. If you can somehow dress it up in “fairness,” you can sneak it by the unwitting public, and that is the subtext of our show.
There’s been so much in the news lately about censorship and Section 230. We have had many shows on attempts to censor the internet. There has been quite a brouhaha about Facebook, Twitter, or other social media sites censoring (or not) depending upon who you believe. There is the whole issue of censorship in general juxtaposed against the very first amendment to the Constitution in the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment, which among other sacred rights, ensures us the rights to express our point of view and the rights of free speech. I have always been interested and curious about this issue, its history, and its future.
Along comes this morning’s guest who writes about the most readable history/political book I have ever come across. It’s entitled The Radio Right. What that means you will learn in a few seconds. The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement. I’m happy to welcome to the show — Paul Matzko. Paul is a historian, graduate of Penn State with a PhD in history, is a passionate student of recent American history, and is also a contributor to libertarianism.org sponsored by Cato.
Paul tells a wonderful story going back to the early days of radio, centering on JFK, who was of course president from 1960 to 1963. He wrote his book Profiles In Courage. But you will learn from this morning’s show that a lot of the characters we discussed in Paul’s book can be in a sequel called “Profiles in Cowardice,” including perhaps JFK himself.
Now, Paul, you tell the story of a band of conservatives who in effect recaptured what was then a dying medium — AM radio. The story really starts back in 1927 but we’re going to join the story in a more contemporary place, which is the Kennedy administration.
What does the Kennedy administration have to do with the birth of conservative radio?
LINKS:
- Paul Matzko | Historian of 20th Century American Politics and Religion
- The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement [BOOK]
- twitter.com/PMatzko
- Talk Radio Is Turning Millions of Americans Into Conservatives | Cato Institute (NYTimes.com)
- John F. Kennedy Did What Donald Trump Only Wishes He Could Do, By Paul Matzko JUNE 14, 2020 • COMMENTARY
- The Sordid History of the Fairness Doctrine — Reason.com by Paul Matzko
- Social Media Regulation in the Public Interest: Some Lessons from History | Knight First Amendment Institute by John Samples and Paul Matzko
- Paul Matzko | Cato Institute
JFK’s War Against AM Radio Broadcasters Explained
Paul Matzko: Bob, it’s a delight to be with you on the show. What Kennedy is concerned about is the overriding priority of every first-term president, which is becoming a second-term president. So, he wins narrowly in 1960 and he’s concerned about this new phenomenon of this right wing radio surge, which was made possible in the 1950s as the big networks — CBS, NBC, and like — shifted their attention to television. Radio is the past; radio is dying. You’ve heard it for a long, long time and it’s never actually true. But, the radio becomes more independent; more local station owners who own just one or two stations are popping up. They’re desperate for programming and they’re willing to air points of view that previously were considered too radical for the airwaves, both on left and right. That included this generation of conservative broadcasters, and they used the airwaves to attack the Kennedy administration.
They had hundreds of stations airing their programs by the early 60s. The largest of them had 20 million weekly listeners, which is as large as Rush Limbaugh some 40 years later, and they criticized the Kennedy administration and its policy.
Kennedy wants to find some sort of mechanism by which to take them down a notch in preparation for his reelection campaign. What he seizes on is using the IRS to audit the heck out of these right wing broadcasters and to remove their tax exemption, but he also uses the Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine. As he says to his FCC Chairman nominee in 1963, “it is important that stations be kept fair.”
Of course what he means is fair to him. So, he targets the Fairness Doctrine against stations that air conservative programming, and forces them to be a lot nicer to the administration. It’s good for his hopes of reelection and his legislative agenda.
Bob Zadek: Let’s now put this into a bit of a broader context. We have the 1960s: television is the new greatest media outlet. AM radio is dying, except for Casey Kasem and the top 40 and rock’n’roll music. So, AM radio is kind of on the wane in its battle for attention, from an influence manipulating standpoint.
What happens is, it switches from big business now to entrepreneurs. As big business goes into television, they lose interest in AM radio, and now AM radio becomes entrepreneurial. In its typical entrepreneurial determination to survive, it gets the leftovers, and the leftovers were among other things, right wing opinion. It was not on television. Television was kind of “WASPish” if you will — very middle America — very mainstream. Walter Cronkite-ish.
What was left for AM radio was what did not migrate to television. In that context, you mentioned the FCC. Now, when radio was created and started to be regulated, it was licensed. We take that for granted that broadcasting is licensed, but just imagine if newspapers had to apply for a license. The word license, of course, is one of the more despicable words in government press, it means you need permission to do something.
Imagine if newspapers or magazines needed to apply for permission to operate. Well radio had to apply for permission. That was because of a fiction — misunderstanding of the laws of physics and electrodynamics. Tell us how we got to a point back in 1927 when there was justification for the licensing of radio but not licensing for print media.
Paul Matzko: It was deeply arbitrary, but it was rooted in the politics of the time. In the 1920s, the Secretary of Commerce was given limited oversight of the airwaves, and Herbert Hoover said, “Hey, we don’t want a truly free market in radio. This is bad and encourages folks who I don’t like.”
His politics are relatively progressive. He’s a progressive Republican. He doesn’t like folks who are outside of the political mainstream, like immigrants owning radio stations, or even broadcasting in languages other than English. He doesn’t like Catholic-owned radio stations, because at the time, anti-Catholic prejudice is very intense in America.
He doesn’t like groups that are outside of the mainstream American society owning radio stations and saying whatever they like on the airwaves. So, there is pressure to use a licensing system to make sure that the only people broadcasting are those who do it out of convenience or necessity, which raises the question: who gets to decide what is necessary for the public? Well, it’s not actually going to be the public, it’s going to be a handful of lawyers at this new Federal Radio Commission, which is eventually renamed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
There is a way of controlling dissident speech — controlling speech by people who aren’t white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. It’s a way of asserting government control over a very vibrant and innovative space. If you actually know about radio before the FCC system, it is this fascinating, culturally diverse space where lots of experimentation and innovation is happening. After the FCC creates a licensing regime that becomes more corporate, more centralized, more mainstream, more moderate, more boring, whiter, more native, etc., it becomes a much less interesting space as a result.
Their licensing regime was justified on the following grounds: they said, “Hey, look, there’s a technical limit to the number of radio stations, there’s a scarcity in the total number of radio stations that can be licensed. Therefore, someone has to choose who gets that limited slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, and it should be the government that decides that.”
This was a post facto justification. It was an argument they made in court that was never actually codified in law. It was balderdash, and we know that because the FCC has never actually met the technical maximum number of stations possible — not then, not now. One of the first things FCC did was tried to shrink the number of stations that were licensed to the benefit of big corporations — the Nexion Radio Network — so it was all a way of asserting government control.
Parallels to Today, and the History of Licensing Communications
Bob Zadek: Let me just put this in context. You described the radio as having small and large stations springing up, a lot of them operating as very small business activities in small markets, with very diverse points of view, and unregulated. Then, along comes the FCC, and after it gets enabling legislation, it starts to control through licensing who can be a broadcaster. When I learned of this history from your book, I immediately thought that that describes the internet: unlicensed, uncontrolled, anybody with a PC can now be a broadcaster, if you will, on the internet, and present a point of view. Nobody can stop them except in authoritarian governments, such as China and North Korea et al., but in general it cannot be stopped; cannot be suppressed. No need for a license, incredibly small barriers of entry, and the receiving public gets exposed to a range of points of view we couldn’t have imagined a couple of decades ago. Is that a fair parallel: pre-FCC radio and internet before governments start to exercise some censorship and other forms of control. Is that a fair parallel?
Paul Matzko: Absolutely, Bob, I think it’s a great parallel. In fact, the timeline is not so different. Early radio stations started to coalesce in the 19-teens, and of course, break out real big in the 1920s. It’s not until 1927, and then 1934, that the FCC bulks up and becomes a phenomenon. So that’s a span of 15 years give or take.
Well, take the distance between the growth of the internet, especially in the 90s — consumer internet here (a world wide web) to today. It’s a little bit more than that, but not so much: 25 years versus 15 years.
In that regard, we are looking at possibly a 1927-type situation where the government seeks to take a new media form that is born free — born unregulated — and clamp down on it, find ways of controlling it in ways that will discourage free expression and will make the internet like radio less interesting, less weird, and more mainstream, and so on. So that’s a very fair comparison.
I would also note that one of the oddities of this time period is that when we say free speech, or the First Amendment, as you introduced to this segment, we often think of free speech as it applies to print newspapers, so it feels weird to us, this proposition that the government would license newspapers. Well, that’s a bit of an American oddity. If you go back in early modern history, it was ordinary for governments in Europe to license newspapers. In America, we reacted against that. We created a very high bar that the government has to clear to shut down someone’s free speech rights in print.
Those protections were being enhanced and strengthened in the 20th century through a variety of court cases. At the same time, though, because of this whole scarcity principle, broadcasting was not given full first amendment protection. So, the government could decide whether or not you could own a radio station on the basis of whether your speech was appealing to those with power, or whether or not your speech was in the “public interest;” i.e. whether it was fair, whether it was equitable, and so on. So, we have a two-track system in print where the First Amendment is a very high bar to clear. It’s getting stronger over time. It is somewhat unique in world history, the extent to which a high versus low bar in print, but in broadcasting, it’s a very low bar. The government is able to say who can speak and what they’re allowed to speak. We have this two-track system — there’s a first amendment in print, but not a true first amendment in broadcasting.
Bob Zadek: Now, the governing principle, as you recited a few moments ago, was “public interest,” convenience, and necessity. Public interest is kind of a broad term. One can ask rhetorically: Well, which segment of the public? The government’s answer is “Well, we’ll get back to you on that.”
Public interest always means the interest of the human being then in power. So, public interest is the opposite of public. It’s one person or one tiny group whose interest is regulated by statutes that empower the government to protect the “public interest,” and to my friends out there, as you learn to fear the word fair, also, public interest is, to borrow from a James Bond movie, a license to prohibit. It’s the power to destroy and the power to control. So, public interest is a scary word.
JFK and the Fairness Doctrine
Bob Zadek: Now fast forward back to JFK. JFK, who is of course (as most politicians are) ambitious, and is looking forward to a second term. I believe this all comes to a head when JFK takes an enthusiastic initiative involving a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of sorts. Tell us about the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and how that fits into the story you tell in your book.
Paul Matzko: For those of your listeners who are old enough to remember. JFK comes out of the gate stumbling with the Bay of Pigs scandal. It’s a bit of a black eye. Is it really his fault? That is questionable but it looks bad and it’s a big foreign policy stumble out the gate. He is concerned for re-election and wants his big foreign policy accomplishment to be the Bay of Pigs. Well, that’s not going to help with the voters. They want a tentpole foreign policy accomplishment that he can pin his reelection hopes on. That is going to be an atmospheric Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union.
It’s the middle of the Cold War, and up until this point, both sides have been detonating bombs above ground, which spreads radiation all over. It’s a bad idea. So it’s actually not a bad concept to attempt to stop that. But to get that approved, you need a supermajority in the Senate — a two thirds Senate confirmation. That’s a high bar to clear even with Democratic control of Congress at the time. There is significant pushback against this bill. Think of the conservative opposition to Barack Obama’s attempt to slow Iran’s nuclear weapons act acquisition.
All those same criticisms were being offered by conservatives in the ’60s against JFK’s proposed Nuclear Test Ban treaty. And it’s working. The congressmen are reporting that the constituent mail coming into their offices is skewing 10 to 1 anti-treaty, and they blame right wing radio. These hosts are attacking it on the airwaves day after day and it’s working. That spooked the Kennedy administration and they said, what can we do to shut down the source of this opposition? Well, there’s this thing called the Fairness Doctrine.
It’s never really been enforced. It’s been on the books since 1949. But it’s the new kind of period of salutary neglect; they just haven’t enforced it. What if we enforce it but only in a targeted way, if every time a radio station airs a broadcaster who criticizes the Nuclear Test Ban treaty? If we make some sort of appeal to the Fairness Doctrine to force that radio station to air something in favor of the treaty?
Bob Zadek: Tell our friends what the Fairness Doctrine is so they have a context.
Paul Matzko: The Fairness Doctrine is real basic. It says that if the owner of the radio station allows some sort of editorializing, like someone not just reporting the facts, but giving an opinion on those facts, then they have to represent the other side. Editorializing, for example, is if you say not just that there’s a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty being proposed in Congress, but that it’s a good or bad thing. If a radio station allows editorializing (and they should, according to the FCC) they have to make sure they represent both major points of view, both for and against the treaty. They cannot just editorialize their own opinion alone. So in theory, it’s meant to promote fair and balanced discussion of current events and political issues.
What Kennedy realizes is, if they only go after unbalanced expression of conservative speech, and never go after unbalanced expression of a liberal speech, they can weaponize this rule. It’s all about enforcement; how do you enforce this? Can you extract partisan advantage? So what the Fairness Doctrine allows you to do hinges on citizen complaints. You need someone listening to the radio station and says, “wait a second, they attacked a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and I support it. I don’t like that. And they didn’t air something that represented my point of view. I’m gonna go to the FCC to file a complaint and next time that radio station’s license comes up for renewal every two years, that complaint will be taken into account.”
They might not get their license renewed, which is the kiss of death for radio stations. So it’s a way of placing pressure on stations that air both sides of opinion. What Kennedy very cleverly does, he illicitly creates a front organization, a fake organization called the Citizens Committee for a Nuclear Test Ban, which is funded by and actually created in the Oval Office itself, but no one knows that. It’s a faux public grassroots organization that can file complaints on behalf of the administration against radio stations allowing a tax on the treaty. It’s kind of a brilliantly underhanded plan to take the sales out of opposition to the treaty.
Bob Zadek: What was the economic effect on the small, entrepreneurial, somewhat conservative, and sometimes very conservative stations? How effective was the use of the Fairness Doctrine? It was a lot more than just a citizen’s complaint. Tell us how it hit their bottom line.
Paul Matzko: The key thing to realize about radio in this period, is that the people making decisions about programming in the 40s, were like a CBS network executive in New York City. But in this period, it’s probably the guy who owns the local car dealership. He bought a station to promote his lot. There’s a big gap in terms of money, in terms of location, in terms of power. And the FCC passed an additional rule to the Fairness Doctrine called the Cullman doctrine, which says, if someone says that you did not represent their point of view among these issues, you have to air their response for free without charge.
Well, that means anytime one of your broadcasters or programs airs something controversial, that gets some sort of response, you’re only getting paid once for having to give away two airtime slots. It doesn’t pay. You’re losing money every time someone says something controversial versus when they say something non- controversial, where there is no room for a fairness doctrine complaint. And these are stations running on shoestring budgets. They’re just some local small businessman, they’re not some big corporate corporation or network executive, and they start avoiding controversial content because it doesn’t pay.
Left wing or right wing, none of this controversial stuff is going to be aired because it means getting double-billed for a single payment. That has a huge chilling effect. It’s very effective.
There’s actually an internal document from a Democratic National Committee sponsored operative team, which is using the Fairness Doctrine to gin up support for Lyndon Johnson’s campaign that year and to hurt Berry Goldwater’s campaign, and they report back to the DNC chair after the ’64 election– which is a landslide for LBJ — that this was valuable, not just because they extracted thousands of hours of free pro-Johnson airtime, but also because it significantly diminished the ability of these right wing hosts to find stations willing to air them. By the end of the decades, after years of the Fairness Doctrine system being in place, right wing radio is a shell of its former self. All the major broadcasters have lost a majority of their radio stations willing to air them.
The End of the Fairness Doctrine, For Now
Bob Zadek: Two thoughts occurred to me, Paul. Number one: it only seemed like weeks ago, that we were all concerned about alleged Russian interference in our election system by manipulating news and fake news. What occurred to me from that story in your book is that election interference goes back to Kennedy and Johnson in the 60s, only the group interfering with free election was the government itself. They were interfering in the electoral process. They were denying voters access to an opinion, because the opinion was adverse. It was in my mind the same thing, only not Russian interference, but White House interference with the election.
So the outrage (is in my view) full outrage. We have often had our own government interfering with our election. So the Fairness Doctrine had its heyday as a valuable tool during the Kennedy-Johnson era, but it’s not around today. Where did the Fairness Doctrine go? Did somebody repeal it? What happened to the Fairness Doctrine?
Paul Matzko: Well, the original wielders of this weaponized Fairness Doctrine (the Democrats in this case in the early 60s) realized that if they get to exercise this power when we’re in control, the other side gets to exercise this power when they’re in control, so everything started looking a little bit different once Richard Nixon takes office.
Nixon uses the threat of Fairness Doctrine control to go after media outlets that are critical of his administration and his policies. So, the shoe is now on the other foot, and they don’t like how it fits. Nixon uses the threat of Fairness Doctrine and other FCC regulatory rules to intimidate big television networks into changing their coverage of the Vietnam War.
They’re criticizing his conduct with the Vietnam War. He doesn’t like it so he sends Chuck Colson, one of his “Committee to Reelect the President” operatives, and he reports back that they are cordial, accommodating and almost apologetic as soon as he brings out the implicit threat of fairness doctrine enforcement, and it worked. So once Nixon started using the Fairness Doctrine as a weapon, everyone who was using it on the other side earlier in the decade started to think that it might not be such a great idea. Some of the historical documents I rely on in my book exist because the people involved realized that it might be a mistake if both sides get to use this weaponized tool. So, there’s a kind of backing away from that position. But once it’s in place, the rule is on the books. It continues to be used through the Nixon administration into the Ford administration.
Then Jimmy Carter comes along, and Jimmy Carter is the true great deregulator. He deregulates everything from airline tickets and flight routes to craft beer and deregulates the airwaves in significant ways. So, Carter’s FCC decides to stop enforcing the Fairness Doctrine as rigorously. So, it started to wane in the late 70s, and then Ronald Reagan in 1987 decided to actually repeal the Fairness Doctrine, and then vetoed the bipartisan congressional attempt to resurrect to codify the Fairness Doctrine at the end in 87. This is notable because Reagan was himself a radio guy. People remember him for TV, for the General Electric theater, for his B-movie western appearances.
But right then, when he was given the choice — he ran for president in 76 and lost; he’s been governor of California earlier in the decade — and given his choice of what he wants to do, while he’s waiting to run once again in 1980, he’s given the choice of an ambassadorship to the United Kingdom or the chair of the Republican National Committee, or all these plum assignments. He’s even given the choice of a primetime slot on television, and he turns all that down for radio. He hosts the daily radio show that he mostly writes himself five days a week for a few years there between 1976 and 1980.
So, he gets the power of FM radio, and understands how it’s a way of building grassroots political support. That’s his own experience, and that’s why I think he repealed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, because he realized that this is a tool for suppressing the politics of people like himself.
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The Rise of Rush Limbaugh and Conservative Talk Radio
Bob Zadek: Is there a direct line to the Rush Limbaugh period when conservative talk radio has its most influential period from the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine?
Paul Matzko: He talks about the Fairness Doctrine a lot. I actually once went and counted in his online transcripts system; he mentioned the Fairness Doctrine in 150 episodes since 2003. When he tells the story of his own career, he started in 1967, as I recall, but in the late 60s as a teenager, he was assigned to a radio station to do community ascertainment, which is a fancy term for making sure that your radio station complies with the various public interest obligations from the FCC, including the Fairness Doctrine.
Rush’s career actually began as just a teenager intern type — a low level employee — trying to make sure that stations comply with the Fairness Doctrine. He saw that period up close and personal when he tells the story of why his station was able to take off in the late 80s and 90s. He’ll point to the repeal of the fairness doctrine as a key player. I think what folks need to realize is that the idea that talk radio is conservative is a bit of an accident of history, which we can talk about later. Back in the 80s, talk radio was actually very politically diverse, both left and right. But talk radio can only exist in a fairness doctrine-free environment.
Your radio show, Bob, can only exist in an environment where there is no rigorous enforcement of Fairness Doctrine. Imagine if you had an obligation in your next show to air a somewhat equivalent amount of speech, arguing the opposite. If every time you aired any kind of criticism of the government, you had to put a pro-government voice on, it would be very hard to have these kinds of current events or political talk shows.
You cannot have right-wing talk radio in the 80s and 90s in a Fairness Doctrine regime. So yes, it’s absolutely the key to that moment. It’s also why if you talk to talk radio people about the Fairness Doctrine, they’ll generally react with horror at the idea that you would want to resurrect this regime in any mass media forum, let alone to the internet, because they remember what it was like in the bad old days. So if you talk to a younger generation of politicians and political activists, they don’t remember that. So, there’s a real kind of generational and mass media forum divide between what the Fairness Doctrine connotes to the listener.
Bob Zadek: While you were speaking, I was making a few notes here. I want to go back to one comment you made about Rush Limbaugh, his early experience and his first employment, you said among other chores he had at a local radio station, that his job, among others, was to make sure the station was operating. And the phrase you used, according to my notes, was in “the public interest.” Here we have a private, for-profit business, that will be denied its right to operate, unless it operates in the public interest. Now, there’s nothing special about a radio station; it is a business, like operating a retail store. Imagine if every privately-operated business had to prove to the government that they were operating in the public interest, which means in the government’s interest, or else they would be denied the right to operate.
It doesn’t seem like that belongs in a free enterprise system. The whole fact that the government had to ration broadcast media somehow — for some fake reason going back to 1927, because there was allegedly limited bandwidth available, that therefore that was scarce — is abhorrent to me. To say the broadband is limited is like saying there is a limited number of grains of sand. That’s kind of true, but that doesn’t mean we’re likely to run out anytime soon.
It’s limited, but it’s limited by a huge number. Well, the bands are limited to some degree, but by a huge number that you pointed out, we’ve never come close to exhausting. So the whole 1927 premise is fake, and because of that, a for-profit business operating in America has to get governmental permission and it has to prove it operates in the public interest, which means in the governmental interest. That leaped off my notes when I wrote it down. It’s astonishing to me.
Paul Matzko: You can do a thought exercise and see how farcical this all is. I mean, there is technically a limited amount of capital. In an economy, there’s only so many dollars to go around. Therefore, there’s only so many companies that can use those dollars and turn it into products and research and development and the like. Imagine someone saying that the government should be allowed to decide which companies exist or don’t exist, because there’s technically a finite amount of capital. Therefore, the government should be allowed to determine which company gets that capital, at which point don’t you say, “Whoa, wait a second, that’s a terrible idea,” right? That’s a command economy. Well, that’s what we did with this one segment of private businesses with radio stations. There’s something very pre-modern about this.
I referenced this before that this idea of licensing the outlets was once normal in pre-modern Europe. To license newspapers, only government-approved newspapers were allowed to be printed. That was once normal. We rejected that early on in the American experiment, but we applied this pre-modern concept of a licensing outlet to radio. There’s something else pre-modern about this system, which is this charter system, where all corporations are chartered by the government, even today. Now today, it’s a formality. You go and file your corporate papers, and you tick some boxes and show that you qualify, etc.
But once upon a time, that was a crucial system of control that the parliament or the legislature used. Sometimes, the crown would charter corporations, and the corporation had to come to them and say, “Here’s why we’re justified to have this corporate charter.” That was a very important tool of control; the government would use it to only charter corporations that benefit the crown, or benefit the state: think of the East India Company and the British Empire in India. So the idea of the corporate charter is like licensing, and that in the pre-modern period, it was a tool of governmental control of private interests. This is a bit of a throwback to those times — the idea that we should license radio stations, or we should control these private businesses and make sure that they serve the public interest. It’s atavistic, pre-modern, primitive, and has to be done away with.
History Repeats with New Legislation — Good Intentions Often Lead to Bad Ideas
Bob Zadek: You say it’s primitive and should be done away with. Well, California and other states have recently enacted legislation requiring corporations, which I believe are incorporated in California or have their principal place of business here, to have the requisite number of women on the board. Now, that’s another example. If you assume that the government, in this case California, has determined that more women on the board is in the public interest, then California is saying you cannot have a license or corporate charter to operate here unless you operate in the public interest by having women on the board.
So, all of this is the lesson that history gets repeated. You lose your license, unless in addition to making a profit for your shareholders you accomplish certain governmental ends. After Biden’s election, the New York Times floated the concept of a “reality czar,” and I thought of your book, and that concept, where that’s the Fairness Doctrine, if you will. So I know it’s not covered in your book, but I’m sure you’ve thought about it. Where does that fall in the historical context of your book?
Paul Matzko: The first thing I’ll note is that most of these bad ideas start with good intentions. So whether it’s a reality czar, and who can be in favor of an alternate reality or misinformation or fake news or a lack of fairness — all these are rooted in the best of intentions. The people proposed the Fairness Doctrine really did just want stations to be fair and balanced in their programming, which is understandable. Who doesn’t want fair and balanced outlets? The question is, is it a good idea to give the state the course of power to try to mandate those things?
It shouldn’t just be a question of whether it’s a good or bad concept. The question is whether the state is the appropriate tool for trying to create that thing?
Because one of the lessons from my book is that giving the state that power may not only not accomplish that, and might not actually accomplish promoting fairness, but it can do the opposite. And my story is one of the most successful episodes of government censorship of the last half century; one of the most significant episodes in US history of government censorship. The fairness doctrine was ironically used to promote a lack of fairness; it was used to protect governmental lies to the people, and to protect the individual partisan interests of the Kennedy administration against the public interest of the actual public.
So there’s a perversity to the intentions of all these rules, whether it’s the public interest standard, whether it’s a fairness doctrine, whether it’s a reality czar: the intents of these people are often good, but they are just naive about what happens when you tried to use state power to accomplish those. I think that’s a big takeaway that applies to all these things, whether it’s a reality czar or a new Fairness Doctrine for the internet.
The Polish Sausage Anecdote & Concluding Remarks
Bob Zadek: You are too charitable when you say the intent was pure.To me that was political cover, not intent. Now, I want you to share this anecdote. What do suburban women and polish sausage have to do with our topic this morning?
Paul Matzko: This is one of my favorite stories in the book. I give a whole chapter to it. So, I call it the great Polish ham boycott, and put yourself in the shoes of the mid Cold War, when people were very concerned about the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and the globe in general, but Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain, and that included Poland. And one of the things Poland was famous for at the time was its ham. They just had a large pig farm industry and they created a lot of ham and supplied it for the rest of the globe. JFK had been given the power by Congress to raise or lower tariffs in the name of national security.
It should sound familiar because it is that exact power that was given to JFK by Congress with the intention of him being able to bypass the legislature, to lower tariffs to promote free trade. That was the intent. But it’s the same power that Donald Trump used during his administration to raise tariffs. While claiming some sort of notion of national security, he raised tariffs on lumber from Canada and on steel and aluminum from East Asia, leading to higher prices for consumers for dishwashers and lumber and the like.
So, there’s a perverse irony there, which is that any tool you give the government to accomplish one end, will someday likely be used to accomplish the opposite end by the other side. So this was going on in the early 60s. Kennedy wants to woo Eastern Europe out from under the Soviet sphere of influence, and is going to do that by creating more free trade. Encouraging trading ties will make them more interested in being allied to us than they are with the Soviet Union, and it kind of works. It’s actually the rise of solidarity later on — the trade union movement in Poland — which overthrows Soviet control in the 80s. Well, the people who are empowered are literally like dock workers or people involved in the trade that is promoted by Kennedy.
This is very unpopular — freer trade with Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe — among conservatives, especially these right wing radio hosts, and they’re attacking it constantly, saying that every penny you spend on a Polish ham is as good as putting a bullet in the gun of a Vietcong soldier shooting our boys in Vietnam. There was actually a poem that circulated claiming that. This sparked a mass boycott movement of suburban housewives all around the country where they would print these cards that said things like, “Only buy your communist products at supergiant.” They would put 1,000s of these cards in pockets of totes and boxes of toothpaste — everywhere in the store — and the store owners couldn’t arrest them because if they did, it would be bad publicity.
Bob Zadek: That put a question mark on Kennedy’s policy. It shows the power of grassroots radio — kind of gives you goosebumps. I will mention to our friends out there, your book is chalk full of those anecdotes. It is very readable. It tells a fascinating story and as you can see from this morning show, every syllable of your book is relevant today in the battle over the internet over tariffs. It’s fascinating how important it is to understand even recent history. It tells the story of how a small band of conservative radio broadcasters influenced policy profoundly up until this day. So Paul, thank you so much for your book.
Originally published at http://bobzadek.com on February 14, 2021.
