The right cannot refer to this as the fairness doctrine. It’s a limit on free speech and should be labeled as such. anytime you say you’re against fairness you’re starting off in the wrong position.
>>The right cannot refer to this as the fairness doctrine. It’s a limit on free speech and should be labeled as such. anytime you say you’re against fairness you’re starting off in the wrong position.<<
Spaghetti Man is dead right. Before we obstruct an attempt to pass a Fairness Doctrine, we have to redefine the issue to place it on favorable terrain. It is an Unfairness Doctrine because it is an attempt to limit free speech in the market place of ideas.
The fundamental idea behind the Unfairness Doctrine is to force a private enterprise to promulgate opinions and ideas it may not agree with nor find economically profitable to do so. The unfairness Doctrine is the force-feeding of attitudes, opinions and beliefs and by statute is authoritarian.
A secondary argument against the Unfairness Doctrine is that we do not wish to force conservative opinions and beliefs on any private enterprise, so why force any belief system on any private enterprise? We are willing to allow the market place of ideas to determine the success or failure of the conservative message and so should other belief systems.
Thirdly, there is the unpracticality of implementation of the Unfairness Doctrine. Is it limited to conservative/liberal duality? Or do Green Party environmentalism, neo-nazism, and other fringe groups get to play, too?
—Gary