Calling it the 4th Estate does not make it responsible for the failures of elected officials.
The Fairness Doctrine, in all likelihood, would not have changed anything because both sides of the political spectrum were in favor of the war at the beginning. Only the most extreme liberals were against it. Even those who opposed it, for the most part, only wanted UN support and did not completely oppose the war. Just because you have another voice in the shouting match does not mean there is any truth to be heard. (you can quote me there)
Now, as for the Fairness Doctrine itself, the news is big business. You may find that distasteful, but it is the truth. Now you want to force privately owned businesses to stop selling a product they are selling well, and sell a product you think needs to be sold. How many versions will we have to have? Conservative & Liberal? Republican & Democrat? Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian? What about the Green Party? What about all the fringe parties? Doesn't their version of it need to be told too? If you are going to use gov't force to regulate it so that all sides are aired, where do you stop?
And who pays for it? Rush Limbaugh makes millions upon millions of dollars doing his show. Air America lost money every day it was on the air. Our tax dollars should pay for AA's inability to compete? And if we pay for theirs, do we now pay Rush too?
I call it the 4th estate because that is how important a free press is to a democratic society. Especially when the question is war and peace.
HOW do the lies the Bush administration fabricated to launch a war have anything to do with truth? The truth was never told. And HOW does only 5 multinational corporations owning all of the media NOT resemble the Nazi propaganda machine or Pravda?
As for the Fairness Doctrine, news is NOT big business. The Fairness Doctrine required licensees to set aside air time FOR news. It set guidelines for minimum amounts of news, public affairs, and other non-entertainment programming.
You are making the false assumption that the airwaves are private property, they're NOT. They belong to all of us.
The Fairness Doctrine is based on James Madison's views of the first amendment.
James Madison (was) the great champion of free speech during the framing of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. For Madison, the First Amendment was important as a way to ensure political equality, especially in the face of economic inequalities, and to foster free and open political deliberation. This conception of the First Amendment sees free speech as servicing the civic needs of a democracy. Free speech, in Madison's view, expresses the sovereignty of the people. Justice Louis Brandeis, also associated with this vision of the First Amendment, emphasized the vital role of citizens in coming together as political equals to engage in rational political discussion. In Brandeis's view, free speech is not just an end unto itself, or simply a freedom from Govern- ment meddling; it is also a necessary means for democratic self-governance.
The philosophical distinction between the free marketplace of ideas metaphor and the Madisonian notion of a deliberative democracy is not academic. It lies at the heart of the public interest standard in broadcasting. From the beginning, broadcast regulation in the public interest has sought to meet certain basic needs of American politics and culture, over and above what the marketplace may or may not provide. It has sought to cultivate a more informed citizenry, greater democratic dialogue, diversity of expression, a more educated population, and more robust, culturally inclusive communities.
The Madisonian concept of free speech helps clarify, then, why public interest obligations have been seen as vital to broadcast television—and why a marketplace conception of free speech may meet many, but not all, needs of American democracy. As constitutional scholars have noted, the famous "marketplace of ideas" metaphor associated with Justice Holmes presumes that diverse ideas have the ability to compete for public acceptance.
http://benton.org/initiatives/obligations/charting_the_digital_broadcasting_future/sec2