Posted on 08/15/2020 9:29:27 AM PDT by John Robinson
- The FCC fairness doctrine was disassembled in 1987. The doctrine was put in place to assure the American people are getting fair, non bias news coverage. Since then there have been no regulations on cable television with regards to children’s content and we haven’t had a non bias source of news since.
- The Clinton administration then introduced the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Which further weakened regulations as it allowed for media cross-ownership. According to the FCC, the goal of the law was to "let anyone enter any communications business – to let any communications business compete in any market against any other."The legislation's primary goal was deregulation of the converging broadcasting and telecommunications markets. However, the law's regulatory policies have been questioned, including the effects of dualistic re-regulation of the communications market.
- In 2011, law that helped to enacted the FCC fairness doctrine was removed from the federal registry entirely.
- The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act (SMMA), was buried in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act because it repealed the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act. The Smith-Mundt Act aka the U.S. Information and Education Act... which authorized the State Department to engage in propagandizing foreign countries as a form of public diplomacy.
The SMA established that via the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), Voice of America (VOA), and Radio Free Europe (RFE), the U.S. State Department and Office of Public Affairs were authorized to disseminate propaganda to foreign publics, but were strictly prohibited from releasing that same propaganda in America for public consumption.
This prohibition was lifted in 2012, when the SMMA was signed into law by President Obama, allowing the same propaganda disseminated by our government to foreign publics, to now be released in the U.S. for the very first time.
And yes, our government is also now allowed to create propaganda tailored specifically for U.S. public consumption, using any media as it sees fit, while remaining anonymous as the source of the material being reported.
That’s a different subsection. That’s about leakage and all that. Big difference than FCC CONTENT regulations that govern broadcast radio and TV. And you know that.
Big difference between the truth and a good story.
Humans, by and large prefer the latter.
Someone ought to do a daily example of media manipulation along the lines of Paul Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story.” Something like “The Story is a Story.”
Thanks JohnRob.
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