Scott Grizzard – Personal Website

How fairness doctrine stifles free speech:

On the surface, the Fairness Doctrine seems like a good idea: if you present a controversial issue, you need to present a fair treatment of the issue and present both sides of the debate. If the public hears both sides of the issue, goes the logic of the doctrine, they can form a better opinion. Furthermore, the argument continues, the fairness doctrine prevents media owners (or managers) from advocating their own political agendas at the cost of public debate.

However, like most public policy, the unintended consequences of the Fairness Doctrine undermine its intended purpose and cause perverse effects that are more harmful than the problem the doctrine was instituted to fix. The two major ways the Fairness Doctrine stifles free speech are 1) opportunity cost and 2) chill of potential prosecution.

Opportunity cost is simply what you give up in order to pursue a given activity. For example, the opportunity cost of me writing this blog is me playing World of Warcraft – the activity I forgo in order to explain the Fairness Doctrine.

In the case of radio shows, there is only so much time in a given radio show (or in a given day if you say the show could just expand to add additional commentary). In order to present a “fair presentation” of an issue (say, the Iraq invasion), a radio host can must cut in half the ten minutes he wanted to spend explaining what a bad idea it was, and give five minutes to a “pro-war” expert. The extra five minutes he might have spent clarifying his point are now quashed.

Furthermore, radio outlets are businesses – there to make money. A radio host once might simply shoot his mouth off for ten minutes about the stupidity of the invasion. Now he must expend the resources to find a “counter point expert” for his show (and pay said expert), resulting in a drier, less appealing (less money making) show. If the alternative is to mouth off about the stupidity of Lindsay Lohan’s latest escapade, needing no additional expert and creating a more appealing ten minutes of commentary, which is he going to choose (at least at the margin)?

Now, look at the station manager’s point of view. If his radio jockey “pushes the envelope” on this, he may have to pay the very real costs of dealing with the FCC. He is much more likely to tell his radio jockeys to “stay away from politics”, and he will choose non-political programming over political programming at the margin. Thus political speech the would have happened absent regulation is quashed.

The function of radio today is not so much to hold public debate; the function of radio is to spark it. The major effect of the Fairness Doctrine is to stifle public debate about issues, since fewer issues can be addressed due to time restraints, fewer people want to listen, and the threat of potential litigation causes risk-averse broadcasters (who are trying to make money) to avoid controversy (at least at the margin).

PS: I did a quick search, and the Cato Institute has a similar article that is likely clearer than mine.

To the one person who gave me a not-so great review on ratemyprofessors.com.

All of the other instructors I have talked to have told me not to obsess about student ratings, but I view my class as my product like a small business owner views his product, and you are the customer. I care about customer experience and satisfaction, so I obsess a little about reviews, and, short of inflating grades, take poor ones as constructive criticism and try to do better in the future.

I am sorry you had a bad experience in my class. Economics is a very tough subject, and it was always my intention to try to make my class engaging and relevant (hence, tangents). You have to work hard at economics, and most students don’t realize how tough the subject is, and consequently don’t study enough for tests. I tried to combat this problem, assigning problem sets filled with discussion problems, [i]making[/i] you think about economics and use economics to look at the world around you. It apparently worked, because the class did very well on the “standardized” questions on the final exam.

I didn’t say I wanted to teach Macroeconomics; I said that economists have improperly bifurcated economics between macro and micro, confusing in both subjects, especially among young students (but among professors to). I said this in the introduction to the lecture on the one-person economy over time, normally not taught until Macro (or worse, Macro II).

It is my continued belief that it is better to introduce “trade-offs between time periods” [i]before[/i] talking about two person trade. It is easiest to understand two-person trade if you already understand inter-time trade, and it is harder to understand inter-time trade once two-person trade has been explained to you. More importantly, the inter-time trade model makes the more complicated micro models much less abstract, because you are aware of the issues we are now assuming away. It gives you less of the feeling that these models, especially those of the firm, are completely devoid of any real-world application, motivating the student to learn the models (or at least not de-motivating them), making them easier to understand.

I’m not the only one who thinks this – I chose the textbook I used in class, Economics for Real People, because Callahan organizes that book in the same way. (And you thought I did it just because the book was free.)

I am sorry about my handwriting. The more times I teach the class, the better my typed overhead notes will get and the less I will write on the board. I also don’t like white boards: I grew up on chalk, and I think it is much easier to write with. That’s not an excuse, just an explanation.

I stand by the course. The class did very well on the standardized questions the department put on my final. I hope the course prepared you for other economics courses you may need to take. I didn’t cover all of the topics normally “breezed over” in Micro, and I added some things that I thought would interest you. If you didn’t like that, I am sorry. I would offer you your money back if the University would let me, but if you take more economics courses, I hope you feel differently about mine (you might not – they will probably be easier than mine was because you took my class).

Note, this post is back-dated since the original forum is not available on-line. I significantly edited my remarks before posting them here.