

Fox News host Sean Hannity. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)

President Trump said during his campaign for the White House that he wants the United States to adopt the libel standards of England, where protections for journalists are weaker. More recently, he floated the idea of reinstating the principles of the Fairness Doctrine, scrapped three decades ago by Ronald Reagan's administration but still enforced in Great Britain and the rest of the United Kingdom.

Perhaps Trump will reconsider the wisdom of emulating the British system after the U.K. regulatory agency Ofcom on Monday cited two of the president's biggest boosters, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson of Fox News, for violating standards of fairness.

(Ofcom has lots of rules, by the way. It cited CNN International for a May telecast that included graphic footage of a chemical-weapons attack in Syria, saying the 8 p.m. air time was not late enough to shield young viewers. It cited “Fox & Friends” for a June 2016 segment about consumer bargains, saying the show did not adequately distinguish between news content and advertising.)

Ofcom ruled that a January episode of Hannity's show and a May episode of Carlson's show failed to satisfy three legal requirements, excerpted below:

“Alternative viewpoints must be adequately represented.”

“Due impartiality must be preserved on matters of major political and industrial controversy.”

“Views and facts must not be misrepresented.”

From a practical standpoint, Ofcom's ruling doesn't mean much. Fox News's parent company stopped airing the channel in the United Kingdom in August, citing low viewership.

Yet the Hannity and Carlson citations are instructive, as examples of the adverse side effects Trump might experience if he were to get serious about further regulations on the media. When the president says, as he did last month, that “it's frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write, and people should look into it,” he seems to imagine a crackdown on negative coverage of his White House without considering what might happen to one-sided reporting in his favor.

Late Night host are dealing with the Democrats for their very "unfunny" & repetitive material, always anti-Trump! Should we get Equal Time? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2017

More and more people are suggesting that Republicans (and me) should be given Equal Time on T.V. when you look at the one-sided coverage? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2017

Trump's October tweets about “equal time” for Democrats and Republicans harked back to a time when the Federal Communications Commission required television broadcasters to cover public policy issues and to balance opposing views.

The FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 after determining “that the doctrine likely violated the free speech rights of broadcasters, led to less speech about issues of public importance over broadcast airwaves, and was no longer required because of the increase in competition among mass media,” according to the Congressional Research Service.

Note that it was a Republican administration that did away with the Fairness Doctrine. And it was Republicans who pushed for a 2009 vote in the Senate to prohibit reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, at a time when some Democrats were complaining about the proliferation of conservative talk radio. The ban passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the Senate, by a vote of 87 to 11.

Hannity called the Fairness Doctrine an “assault on the First Amendment” at the time. He understood the potential drawbacks of mandatory, government-defined fairness.