“Welcome to the newsroom, komrade...”
The left is pretty quiet about it so they apparently feel that the rules won’t apply to them.
There goes freedom of speech.
Not really. That's second, a very close second. But you want to know the truth? Every major repressive Regime of the modern era has begun with universal health care. That's the first thing Hitler did. That's partly how you get the media on your side. Is it championing issues all of them support. Then you go get total control over them. But health care is the first thing, because that is direct control, total control over everybody in your country.
I beleive gun control/confiscation comes first. The Regime has tried and failed on that account. The question is, "Will patriots use their 2a rights to overthrow tryanny?"
Heck, I thought the liberal news rooms already had fax machines with a direct link to the White House to get there stories.
This is dangerous to and the left needs to wake up. Everything the left feared about Bush is coming to fruition under Obama.
The Mainstream Media are Marxists and their ideology is their religion - PERIOD.
As long as the promotion of their religion into the Utopian Marxofascist state is achieved - they will applaud and excuse the use of ‘government overseers’ of the news and information.
The imposition of their political religion is all that matters. By diktat, fiat, force or coercion. Makes no difference how it is imposed, just that it is.
As they have written and said so many times in one form or another - we cannot be trusted with freedom or rights.
Freedom of speech, the press, assembly and redress are…. overrated next to their demand for government to provide everything and decide everything.
And don't forget the press: the FCC "proposal" includes the print media. How the FCC has any say over the print media is beyond me, but this is a naked power grab.
They (the Lefty's) know that this just a left-handed attempt to bring back the Fairness Doctrine and force any radio or TV show that leans Right to go Left or lose their license, so they know they're safe.
Watch things get even loonier as the zero king runs out of time for his administration to "fundamentally transform" Amerika into his version of a Muslim Soviet.
The dog that didn't bark. How very curious that this was not news, was never news, didn't happen. Whose putative "suspension" came to us through Adweek, of all places. To the question "Would 0bama really place commissars in the newsrooms?" there is no apparent curiosity because like the Dog That Didn't Bark, the media are not only fine with it but were in on it from the beginning. These are, after all, people who dedicated themselves to marginalizing and then burying the use of the IRS against the Democrats' political opponents. Why not the FCC?
Should this story not sink to the bottom of the ocean as Benghazi did, we should shortly hear a media blitz spearheaded by Journ-o-list style coordination that the whole thing was a paranoid right-wing fantasy that never happened. Watch carefully who says this, for they are not our friends.
Time for another House Special Lawyer to Investigate Gestapo Media tactics by Soetoro-Obama, Garrett and Holder.
It sounds as if the simplest thing would be to abolish the FCC, since it’s unconstitutional to begin with. Since when does the Federal government own the air? Did they buy it from somebody?
It might be time to move news organizations to another country with more freedom of the press. Use globalization against them. Sort of like Pirate Radio.
If some of these people wait too long to stand up - they won't be allowed to...
Whether admitted or not, the newspapers haven’t been reporting the news for a long time. The FCC doesn’t have to “take over” newspapers, too may liberals have BOUGHT the newspapers.
The paper here in Mobile, they leave stuff out all the time and are now going to “revamp” the paper into two sections.
I feel like my heads gonna explode.
The better question is this — why should the FCC care what editors at TV stations and especially newspapers are thinking? More than a week ago, FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai blew the whistle on the commission’s proposed study of editorial bias in news rooms, even though the FCC has no jurisdiction on broadcast news content, and no jurisdiction whatsoever on newspapers. Fox News began covering this yesterday:Fox: FCC probe on editorial choice unnerves media
Howard Kurtz writes today that the FCC doesn’t belong in the newsroom anywhere:
I know that television stations are licensed in the public interest. It’s fair for the FCC to examine how much news a station offers, as opposed to lucrative game shows and syndicated reruns. But the content of that news ought to be off-limits.
The Fairness Doctrine, which once required TV and radio stations to offer equal time for opposing points of view, is no more, and good riddance (since it discouraged stations from taking a stand on much of anything). The Obama administration swears it’s not coming back.
How, then, to explain this incursion into the substance of journalism, which seems utterly at odds with the notion of a free and unfettered press?
Now some of the commentary about this is overheated, with talk of an FCC “thought police” and so on. The effort is beginning in a single city. But already there are signs that the commission is backing off.
Adweek reports that “controversial” sections of the study will be “revisited” under new chairman Tom Wheeler. An FCC official told the publication that the agency “has no intention of interfering in the coverage and editorial choices that journalists make. We’re closely reviewing the proposed research design to determine if an alternative approach is merited.”
The FCC should keep its alternative approaches to itself, as even the posing of these questions carries an intimidation factor. The government has no business meddling in how journalism is practiced. And if George W. Bush’s FCC had tried this, it would be a front-page story.
Just how overheated is that kind of talk, though? It’s difficult to determine any other reason for the FCC to take an interest in editorial decisions unless it wants to intervene in that process. It’s not all that outrageous to believe that the only reason a federal agency wants to conduct a study of an area over which it has no authority or jurisdiction is to craft an argument to get that authority and jurisdiction, especially if it can claim a crisis exists. And the only reason why the government would want to control editorial choice is to make sure it benefits government.
The study design is available online, by the way, and it’s impressive for the depth in which the FCC intends to probe editorial choice. The purpose of the study, according to its authors, is “to identify and understand the critical information needs (CINs) of the American public (with special emphasis on
vulnerable/disadvantaged populations).” This assumes that the American public can’t identify their own “CINs” and find ways to service them in a historically-diverse and dynamic media environment, of course, which is flatly laughable.
The study would involve interviews at all kinds of outlets — newspapers and Internet included, even though they are outside of FCC jurisdiction — in order to determine whether the FCC sees a CIN crisis. What are the purposes of the interviews with media owners, editors, reporters, and others?
The purpose of these interviews is to ascertain the process by which stories are selected, station priorities (for content, production quality, and populations served), perceived station bias, perceived percent of news dedicated to each of the eight CINs, and perceived responsiveness to underserved populations.
The FCC will judge media outlets individually and in groups based on their own perception of critical “CINs” rather than allow consumers to figure that out for themselves. One of these is “employment information”:
The Critical Review of the Literature established a set of necessary thresholds in each of the eight categories, many of which have both an objective and individual component. For example, in a given community, are there channels for emergency communication that can reach the entire population? If not, who is excluded, for what reasons, under what conditions? Is there a sufficiently robust market in employment information, in print, online or other?
Who determined that “employment information” was one of the Big Eight CINs in the first place? What kind of “employment information” interests the FCC? We have want ads, Monster.com, Craigslist, and most employers have websites with hiring needs listings. If companies want to hire, they’ll determine their own CINs, and people who need jobs will find them. Or does the FCC want to go after coverage of employment information — like, say, jobless rates, workforce participation, and the like?
The answers show just how far outside of the FCC’s jurisdiction this goes. Here are the questions for station owners and HR:
• What is the news philosophy of the station?
• Who is your target audience?
• How do you define critical information that the community needs?
• How do you ensure the community gets this critical information?
• How much does community input influence news coverage decisions?
• What are the demographics of the news management staff (HR)?
• What are the demographics of the on air staff (HR)?
• What are the demographics of the news production staff (HR)?
Not one of these questions fall within the aegis of the FCC, except arguably the community reception of information — and that only for broadcasters. The questions get more intrusive for editors and mid-level managers:
• What is the news philosophy of the station?
• Who else in your market provides news?
• Who are your main competitors?
• How much news does your station (stations) air every day?
• Is the news produced in-house or is it provided by an outside source?
• Do you employ news people?
• How many reporters and editors do you employ?
• Do you have any reporters or editors assigned to topic “beats”? If so how many and what
are the beats?
• Who decides which stories are covered?
• How much influence do reporters and anchors have in deciding which stories to cover?
• How much does community input influence news coverage decisions?
• How do you define critical information that the community needs?
• How do you ensure the community gets this critical information?
When one looks at the actual study commissioned by the FCC, it’s difficult to laugh off the “thought police” aspects of it. That’s especially true with the surfeit of demographic questions that belong more to the EEOC’s jurisdiction, and the stated focus of “perceived responsiveness to underserved populations,” in an era of exploding choice and demographic targeting by media. One can see the “crisis” the FCC will want to solve a mile off. It’s pretty obvious what the FCC is thinking.
The Anchoress clarifies matters for Kurtz:
“What are they thinking?” Mr. Kurtz, it’s pretty obvious; they’re thinking no one in the mainstream press has asked them a difficult or challenging question in 7 years, so why would they start now.
- They’re thinking an obsequious press that couldn’t be bothered to sustain outrage over intrusions into its own phone and internet records won’t have a problem with the government parking itself into the newsroom.
- They’re thinking that if the mainstream press could forgive them for considering espionage charges against a member of the press — for doing what reporters are supposed to do — and then re-commence their habitual boot-licking, there is no real risk of media folk suddenly calling out a “red line”, or even being able to identify one.
- They’re figuring that with this president, the mainstream media has no idea what “a bridge too far” might mean. Nor, “abuse of power”; nor “cover-up”; nor “mendacity”,“incompetence”, “ineptitude” or “constitutional illiteracy.”
- They know that half the people in the newsroom are either married or to (or social buddies with) influential members of this government, and that everyone is all comfy and nicely settled in for the revolution.
- They know that the press willfully surrendered its own freedoms some time ago, in the interests of ideology, and so they really won’t mind a little editorial supervision from the masters:
. . .we no longer need wonder why the mainstream media seems unconcerned about possible attacks on our first amendment rights to freedom of religion and the exercise thereof. They have already cheerfully, willfully surrendered the freedom of the press to the altar of the preferred narrative. People willing to dissolve their own freedoms so cheaply have no interest in anyone else’s freedom, either.
- They know that if they like their newsroom, they can keep their newsroom, once it has been correctly updated. A Mad Man might sell the scheme as Prexy-Clean. Journalism “new and improved with powerful cleansing agents!”
I hope that helps, Mr. Kurtz.
They’re thinking that no one’s paying any attention. And so far, for the most part, they’ve been correct.
Update: I fixed a formatting error in The Anchoress’ excerpt. Also, my friend Warner Todd Huston sent up the first signal flare on this issue in November, so be sure to read that post, too.
Rush really should INVITE one of the Federal fascist news “observers” into his news room, and then harass him/her mercilessly as well as broadcasting a running commentary of the conversations. It would be an awesome gag.
Maybe even better would be to have a running gag of a FAKE Federal newsroom monitor, and then Rush could make up anything he wanted about it, thoroughly ridiculing the whole thing, ridicule which would kill the whole idea quicker than simply protesting it.
BTW, the only big media outfit dealing with this story has been News Corp outlets. It wasn’t until after Megyn Kelly’s broadcast last night that the MSM has bothered to mention it: WaPo just ran their first story on this 29 minutes ago. Some of the lesser outlets mentioned it 12 hours ago. NY Slimes, LA Slimes, NBC/CBS/ABC/CNN/AP/McClatchy/Yahoo/Google? Nothing. Nada. Zip.