Right To Access To The Broadcast Media

By Author: FIRELEAVES
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The Supreme Court has also held that candidates have "an affirmative right to access to the broadcast media." This ruling, handed down in July 1981, was the result of a challenge by the Jimmy Carter campaign to network denial of the right to purchase thirty minutes of prime time in December 1979. ABC and NBC had rejected the request outright. CBS had offered two 5-minute time slots Tag Heuer Replica instead. Under the new ruling, a broadcaster can deny access only if the requested purchase would substantially disrupt programming. The candidate may then appeal that decision to the FCC, which is empowered to determine whether or not to order that the ad run. If the station refuses an FCC request to air the ad, its license can be revoked.

Before this ruling, the FCC simply required stations to discuss controversial issues (the Fairness Doctrine) and to grant equal time to all qualified candidates if any one candidate was given or permitted to purchase time (Section 315). Writing for the Supreme Court in 1981, Chief Justice Warren Burger argued that "it is of particular ...
... importance that candidates have the opportunity to make their views known so that the electorate may intelligently evaluate the candidates' personal qualities and their position on vital public issues before choosing among them on Election Day."

How then is it possible for presidential debates among two or three major contenders to take place? The debates between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy in 1 960 occurred because Congress had suspended Section 3 1 5 to permit them to occur. The debates between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in 1 976, between Ronald Reagan and John Anderson and Reagan and Jimmy Carter in 1980, between Reagan and Walter Mondale in 1984, between Michael Dukakis and George Bush in 1988, between Ross Perot, Bush, and Bill Clinton in 1992, and between Bob Dole and Clinton in 1996 were possible under a 1 975 ruling of the FCC that held that such debates were bona fide news events and, as such, were exempt from the equal opportunity requirement.

To be considered a bona fide news event, the FCC's Aspen Institute ruling of 1975 held that the debates must be sponsored by an outside organization (in 1976, 1980, and 1984, it was the League of Women Voters; in 1988 and 1992, the Presidential Debate Commission), must be planned without the involvement of the broadcast media, must not occur in the broadcaster's facilities, and must be covered live and in their entirety.

Some other news formats are also exempt from the requirements of Section 315. Bona fide newscasts and interview shows, such as Meet the Press, are exempt. A news conference scheduled by the candidate Omega Replica Watches and considered newsworthy by the broadcaster is also exempt if it is covered live and in its entirety.

In 1983, the FCC widened the scope of the Aspen ruling by exempting debates sponsored by broadcasters as on-the-spot news coverage. This cleared the way for the broadcast networks to sponsor debates in the presidential primaries, which they did for the first time in 1984. In the general elections, however, the debates have continued to be sponsored by an outside organization. Beginning in 1988, when the League of Women Voters objected to the level of candidate control demanded by Bush and Dukakis, the debates have been sponsored by the Presidential Debates Commission, a nonprofit organization head by the past chairs of the two major parties.