Even when working-class candidates succeed in gaining a spot on the ballot, the U.S. billionaire class has used its courts, laws, and regulatory agencies to maintain the Democratic-Republican monopoly on access to radio, television, and mass-circulation newspapers and magazines.

Through the 1940s and even 1950s, candidates of working-class parties often received coverage on national radio news broadcasts. Over the past decades, however, provisions such as the so-called Equal Time Rule and the Fairness Doctrine, supposedly guaranteeing airtime to "minor" candidates, have been stripped of content or used--often cynically, in the name of "fairness"--to impose a virtual media blackout on all but the bosses’ candidates.

In 1934 Congress adopted the Communications Act, establishing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), to regulate the broadcast industry. One provision of the law, Section 315, known as the "Equal Time Rule," deals with access to the broadcast media. It states, "If any licensee shall permit any person who is a legally qualified candidate for any public office to use a broadcasting station, he shall afford equal opportunities to all other such candidates for that office in the use of such broadcasting station."

The Equal Time Rule applies to paid airtime for candidates on radio and TV and to some free spots for candidates. It initially applied to news coverage.

In 1948, at the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) convention where Farrell Dobbs and Grace Carlson were nominated as the SWP candidates for president and vice president, respectively, their acceptance speeches were broadcast nationwide by ABC and other radio networks. Over the course of the election campaign Dobbs gave at least five nationally broadcast speeches on the four main networks: NBC, ABC, CBS, and the Mutual Broadcasting System. He also took part in 15 nightly radio forums on a New York station.

In 1959, however, Congress amended Section 315 to exempt TV and radio stations from giving "equal time" to other candidates on "bona fide news events." It did so after an opponent of Democratic mayor Richard Daley of Chicago requested free airtime from a TV station after Daley was covered on the evening news. The FCC has systematically expanded the category of programs exempted from political access requirements.

In particular, the Democrats and Republicans have worked hard to restrict access to televised presidential debates. When the first televised presidential debates were held in 1960, Congress suspended the rules to allow the Kennedy-Nixon debate to proceed without the networks having to grant airtime to the "minor" candidates. These were Farrell Dobbs of the SWP, Eric Hass of the Socialist Labor Party, Orval Faubus of the segregationist States’ Rights Party, and the Constitution and Prohibition candidates.

No more presidential debates were organized until 1976 because the incumbents refused to debate and because of the possibility of third candidates demanding equal time.

In 1975 the 1960 exemption was formalized and broadened when the FCC defined candidate debates as "bona fide news events." To pull it off, they got the willing agreement of the League of Women Voters to sponsor the debates, allowing the networks to cover them as a "news event." In 1988 the job of sponsoring debates was taken over by the Commission on Presidential Debates.  
 
‘Fairness Doctrine’ limits access
A separate provision was the Fairness Doctrine, which the FCC instituted in 1949. It required that broadcasters "operate in the public interest and afford reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views on issues of public interest." This made it possible for candidates and others to be granted airtime to offer opposing views to those broadcast by the networks.

The networks, however, often used the Fairness Doctrine as a pretext for limiting equal access. For example, they would refuse to cover "minor" candidates by arguing that if they did so, they would then be required by the Fairness Doctrine to give equal time to others.

The major TV networks campaigned to abolish the Fairness Doctrine altogether, insisting that, if newspapers were not covered by such a provision, TV programs shouldn’t be either. The FCC dropped the Fairness Doctrine from its statutes in 1987.

Although there have not been similar federal regulations covering newspapers and magazines, the owners of the big-business dailies, weeklies, and monthlies have generally followed in the footsteps of the major radio and TV networks and stations. Over the past quarter century, the editors of these publications have given less and less coverage--often none at all--to candidates other than those running on the Democratic or Republican party lines or various bourgeois "third party" candidates of left or right, such as Patrick Buchanan, Ross Perot, or Ralph Nader.
 
 
Related articles:
Socialists defend right to campaign in elections
SWP presidential ticket of Dobbs-Carlson broadcast nationwide in 1948 campaign  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home