Posted on 01/19/2006 10:03:15 AM PST by Dr. Scarpetta
House Democrats proposed two bills in 2005 to bring the Fairness Doctrine back—and as a law, rather than a mere agency regulation.
New York Democratic representative Louise Slaughter, who introduced the first of the two bills, says that Right-ruled radio is a grave threat to American freedoms, “a waste of good broadcast time, and a waste of our airwaves.”
People “may hear whatever they please and whatever they choose,” she tells PBS’s Bill Moyers, in a statement as incoherent as it is illiberal.
“And of course they have the right to turn it off. But that’s not good enough either. The fact is that they need the responsibility of the people who are licensed to use our airwaves judiciously and responsibly to call them to account if they don’t.”
In other words, people can’t be trusted with freedom but need the supervision of a paternalist government.
Slaughter doesn’t want to re-regulate only radio. When asked by Moyers if she was also proposing the new Fairness Doctrine for Fox News or MSNBC, Slaughter responded: “You bet. . . . Fairness isn’t going to hurt anybody.”
If there’s anything liberals hate more than talk radio it’s Fox News, which has dominated cable news by appealing to conservative viewers fed up with the networks’ liberal bias.
New York Democratic representative Maurice Hinchey, sponsor of the second Fairness Doctrine bill, went so far as to host a special Capitol Hill screening of Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, a “documentary” hit job.
Slaughter, Hinchey, Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders, Washington State congressman Jay Inslee, and several other House lefties have recently formed the Future of American Media Congress to push for a media crackdown.
Finally, in early 2005, an online petition drive called for Americans to “renew the Fairness Doctrine.” The imbalance favoring conservative media voices, especially in talk radio, the petition argued, “results in issues of public importance receiving little or no attention, while others are presented in a manner not conducive to listeners’ receiving the facts and range of opinions necessary to make informed decisions.”
One of the three sponsors of this paternalistic document: Media Matters for America, a left-wing press watchdog group, founded by conservative-turned-lefty David Brock, with help from ex–Clinton advisor John Podesta.
If the Dems take back Congress or the White House, watch out. Nothing would please them more than to drag the country back to the good old days, when liberals didn’t have to put up with Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham and Bill O’Reilly and Matt Drudge and the countless other upstarts recasting our public debate.
The Right—joined by free-speech defenders from across the political spectrum—needs to defeat the liberal regulatory threat before it does real damage to Americans’ rights to express their political views.
President Bush should strongly back Hensarling’s Online Freedom of Speech Act, whose sponsors may reintroduce it soon in the House under regular rules, which require only a simple majority to pass it.
Showing that he gets it, the president has just nominated three reportedly liberty-minded lawyers to fill FEC vacancies, including Robert Lenhard, part of the legal team that challenged McCain-Feingold’s constitutionality.
One campaign-finance reform group described the Lenhard pick as “beyond disappointing”: excellent news for free-speech fans.
In deciding two campaign-finance reform cases in the months ahead, the Roberts Court, one hopes, will show greater enthusiasm for First Amendment protection of political speech than did its predecessor, which should have shot down McCain-Feingold.
If neither Congress nor the Supreme Court repeals this unconstitutional, un-American travesty, we can expect election regulations, in the grim words of Justice Antonin Scalia’s McConnell dissent, “to grow more voluminous, more detailed, and more complex in the years to come—and always, always, with the objective of reducing the excessive amount of speech.”
Thus will our most effective real protection against “the actuality and appearance of corruption”—the First Amendment itself—be nullified.
Lovers of liberty should expose calls to restore the Fairness Doctrine for the fraudulent power-grab that they plainly are. And the Right, in particular, needs to understand how much it has benefited from a deregulated media universe.
It should be confident that it has the right ideas, and that when it gets the chance to present them directly to the American people—as the new media have allowed it to do—it will win the debate.
Cowards
A hush Rush ping.
Fox News FAIR And Balanced.
Go ahead, ban him.
They're not cowards....they're facists.
Interesting - the lefties are always complaining about Freedom of Speech, and now here's yet another whacko wanting to control what goes out on the radio waves. Bzzzzzzzzzzzt. Sorry - she loses!
and they'll impeach Bush...
Another reason to flee broadcast radio for satellite.
These people are pathetic.
The "Fariness Doctrine" has nothing whatsoever to do with fair. It is a blatant attempt to silence any public criticism of the left.
Ya know--this bill would also affect FR and DU. Wonder how the moonbats over there feel about this?
Democrats will do it if they have the votes.
Agreed and a fascist is just a coward who takes the easy route when faced with opposing viewpoints.
They want free speech if it's their way.
"Fairness Doctrine".... Sounds like something straight out of Atlas Shrugged.
“And of course they have the right to turn it off. But that’s not good enough either. The fact is that they need the responsibility of the people who are licensed to use our airwaves judiciously and responsibly to call them to account if they don’t.”
...but of course Howard Stern, all the "I have a problem shows" and sexual explicit shows are a good use of airwaves.
These people make me sick. If leftist thinking were really all that popular, it would be competitive in the marketplace of ideas. What better evidence that leftist thinking ISN'T popular then the fact that it is virtually non-existent within commercial talk radio. So, in order to push unpopular ideas, the Dems want to force these ideas upon radio listeners by act of Congress.
But the left became oblivious to their own irony long ago. Which means it no longer acts as a hedge against their ever-increasing extremism.
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