The Left Doesn’t Like the “Fairness Doctrine” When Applied to Michael Moore

David Horowitz's NewsReal Blog ^ | January 28, 2011 | Walter Hudson

[Walter Scott Hudson]

A town in Connecticut has backpedaled away from an attempt at censorship. The incident involved a public exhibition of the Michael Moore film SiCKO.

The town forced the Enfield Public Library to abandon a January screening of Moore's documentary. Enfield Mayor Scott Kaupin told the Journal Inquirer that the film is a "poor choice" and that if the library didn't reconsider it would face "repercussions" from the Enfield Town Council at budget time(…)

In the days since Enfield's censorship of its library made national headlines, politicians in this community are shifting their argument... Their back-up argument is that the library needs to present balancing, opposing ideas.

That was the essence of the so-called “Fairness Doctrine,” a policy which has been ironically evoked here against the work of a prominent leftist. Typically, when we think of the “Fairness Doctrine,” we think of talk radio and opinion news programming, where the Left has had difficulty finding an audience and sought to impose themselves through legal mandate. However, this Enfield incident shows how the principle can be applied against the Left as easily as the Right.

If town leaders intend that each and every screening involve a double-feature with documentaries with opposing outlooks, well, that's both difficult and stupid. If filmgoers are treated to a documentary about the Holocaust, it may be impossible to find a film that praises Hitler, Nazis and Aryan supremacists(…)

If you heard that a government was limiting the public's access to books or movies, you might suppose you had parachuted into a Third World dictatorship, a communist country or some other totalitarian regime, not an American town in the Constitution State. Enfield should be ashamed of itself.

[Tempest]

Goebbals still has some films lying around i’m sure.

[KarenMarie]

When it is the ‘right’ it is a fairness issue.
when it is the ‘left’ it is a freedom of speech issue.

i thought everyone knew that.

[piytar]

Oh crud, that’s YOU. Sorry, may have been overly harsh there. But I’ll stand by my main point. There is a HUGE difference between “We won’t pay for that” (re Sicko) vs “We will pull your license if you do/don’t do X” (fairness doctrine).

[buccaneer81]

Big difference: Taxpayers fund the Enfield Public Library. They don’t fund commercial radio.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

The "Fairness Doctrine" assumes that fairness can be adjudicated. That assumption has no basis in the Constitution (including, centrally, the First Amendment).

The Constitution insists on regular, predictable, process. It makes no claim that the results will be "fair."

If you want a Fairness Doctrine which takes the objectivity of journalism as a starting point, you should start by proving that journalism is objective. The thesis that journalism has no bias is a negative, and inherently unprovable even if true.

What makes it doubly difficult to prove, of course, is the fact that that thesis is, experientially and theoretically, provably false.