Journalists may not soon remember 1949; the newspaper industry was not in immediate financial peril, the dot-com bubble had not yet even been blown and the only verifiable "social networks" in existence were our parents' innocuous book clubs. Sixty years later, of course, the American media landscape would be infinitely more complex – what with the 24-hour news cycle and a host of robotic reporters to deliver it – but in the late 1940s, news was hardly a dialogue. Journalists transmitted content down to the masses with inconsequential interaction.

In that highly hierarchical setting, the controversial "Fairness Doctrine" made theoretical sense. Airwaves, cogitated the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), were extremely limited national resources over which only content in the public interest, convenience or necessity should be transmitted. The absence of alternative forums for public discourse at the time necessitated regulations that required broadcasters to balance polemic perspectives, those political or otherwise, and the Fairness Doctrine provided underrepresented persons the grounds upon which to challenge majority viewpoints.

For better or worse, the doctrine as first envisioned did not last very long; the Supreme Court in the 1950s balked at any notion of mandated speech – they argued, in a political context, that it hampered debate – and Congress in the 1980s failed to advance its pilot bill past President Richard Nixon's desk. In short, the political reality of the Fairness Doctrine died two decades ago – though its spirit, especially as a manipulative tool in political discourse, would live on for quite some time.

Enter the conspicuously partisan arguments that have surfaced this month for and against a renewed Fairness Doctrine. Democrats, surprisingly excluding President Barack Obama, pine for a legal basis by which to challenge Republican dominance of talk radio. The GOP, by contrast, has rebuffed any such assertion that media need federally-administered viewpoint diversification. Although neither party has proposed anything substantive, their respective arguments say plenty about the political significance of a new Fairness Doctrine – that it is hardly more than mandated speech disguised as something considerably more beneficent. But while the debate over the Fairness Doctrine may in fact represent Washington's present political climate, especially if it passes, it largely ignores the present media reality in which it would otherwise operate.

There exists no better example of such lack of foresight than House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman's (D-Calif.) alleged suggestion this week that the FCC ought to explore an Internet variant of the old broadcast law. As an anonymous committee source told The American Spectator on Monday, Waxman seeks to codify some regulation related to source balancing on the Internet, although no specifics – legal or political – have been provided.

Politically savvy? Perhaps. Realistic given the present media landscape? Hardly. Assuming The Spectator is correct – and Waxman has already claimed he has said nothing about an Internet Fairness Doctrine -- the fact that any politician even perceives the need for such source balance, especially on the Internet, only indicates the gross disconnect between politicians and people over the nature of new media.

While Internet communities – newspaper forums, social networks, the blogosphere, the Twitter-sphere and others – are in no way panaceas to mainstream political reportage's plethora of ills, they represent new attempts at lateralization. The infinite connections that Web audiences have formed characterize a categorical usurpation of authority from journalists previously housed in a comfortable ivory tower. And as a result, argues New York University Professor Jay Rosen with the help of theorist Daniel Hallin, the masses have decentralized the process of defining the "sphere of legitimate debate." Unlike the 1940s, when one-way comminication (radio and later television) dominated news media, today's forums to discuss controversial issues are not limited in size or scope; they are in fact multi-dimensional and overbroad, which is often the problem.

Lawmakers who observe the occasional outrageousness of the Web are thus tempted to limit it in the same way their predecessors applied the Fairness Doctrine to older media. That approach, for reasons clearly defined, is fruitless. From innovation has emerged choice, and from an utter dissatisfaction with lackluster mainstream news organizations have arrived limitless opportunities to create new ones online. Put more colloquially, it does not matter how poorly Web stories are sourced and how biased and offensive some of them might be; lateralization has permitted a generation of content hungry Americans to look elsewhere for their news, to find opinions that often confirm (and less frequently defy) their beliefs and to share those opinions with others.

Most assuredly, selective exposure in a democracy is never desirable; but that, after all, was what the Fairness Doctrine reinforced the first time the FCC implemented it in 1949. In actuality, most Americans will always lambaste the Web for the worthless whining it occasionally is (at least, statistically, this is so, as more news consumers still opt for television and radio before the Internet). But a law of any sort that seeks to redefine the content transmitted through any medium, especially the Internet, only complicates the news media's natural evolution; attempts to obstruct that process, for either unfairly partisan or completely legitimate reasons, are more damaging to "democracy" than the GOP's talk radio shows or the Democrats' numerical majority will ever be. Indeed, journalists may not soon remember the facile stresses of yesteryear, but politicians would be remiss to forget -- nay, ignore -- the new media trends of the present.