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.
Why dont the Dems call it what it is... "The Communist Fairness Manifesto"? Heck, they already call it a "doctrine".
They will have to control the House, the White House, and have 60 votes in the Senate.
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 CNNBCBSABC are not a waste of broadcast time and our airwaves?
We can't have the people, who after all own the airwaves, not this boneheaded legislator, being satisfied. These are prime examples of the dimwits in our Congress!
This could never fly on cable television (ie. Foxnews) because of first amendment issues. It only works on radio and broadcast television because the airwaves these entities use are considered limited public property and subject to public regulation. This doesn't apply to cable and satellite broadcasts. In the past this doctrine proved unworkable and most broadcasters ended up avoiding any political or social issues for fear of being labeled biased by the FCC.
Ping
Metallica's song Eye of the Beholder is a song with lyrics that near perfectly represent the lefts pronouncements of "supporting freedom and liberty" all the while doing all they can to stiffle any dissent through government force.
Exactly!
I thought this must have been posted by Scrappleface. Surely they can't be serious!
Yes, go ahead and try. Conservative talk radio is an established institution. The Rats would see a repeat of the slaughter they got in the 1994 midterm elections.
Never underestimate how low they will go. They despise Rush on a daily basis.
They'll want to police blogs, websites, advertisements, magazines, mailers.... etc, etc. Will we all have to flea to satellite radio?
" Fairness isn’t going to hurt anybody.”
Especially if it's more "fair" to the vast left wing commie, fascist, racist "liberal" conspiracy.
Do you believe this? Is this from Scrappleface or the Onion?
There is a big difference between free speech and government-induced propaganda. Slaughter's bill slips over into the latter. Why should broadcasters be coerced to include what Slaughter thinks is appropriate?
watch conservative radio go satellite.
Any elected officeholder who advocates any infringment on our Freedom of Speech should be voted out of office.
Scratch a liberal and you get a red faced screaming communist.
“And of course they have the right to turn it off. But that’s not good enough either."
Sure it is! I like Air America....when it's turned off!
No
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