Posted on 02/24/2014 11:00:47 AM PST by Jim Robinson
Bureaucracy: The FCC jumped the shark with its outrageous plan to police America's newsrooms. This grasp for a new mission signals an agency that has outlived its purpose. We have a better idea: Just scrap the FCC.
There's nothing worse than a federal agency that has lost its original mission, has nothing productive to do and, as a result, is restlessly rustling around for something to justify its existence.
That describes the Federal Communications Commission, an old-line agency founded in the 1930s to regulate a limited supply of television airwaves divided among three networks, which is now gone with the wind.
Today, television airwaves are virtually unlimited and consumers can flip through thousands of channels to find the news and entertainment they want. Besides the explosion of television choices, consumers also have the Internet, providing billions of options in a nanosecond for information on anything consumers want.
Its mission gone, the FCC is rapidly getting into mischief. It claims its mission is to lower barriers to new entry for all citizens, giving itself a civil rights patina, but its record shows a long history of erecting barriers.
Every major innovation in communication has had to scale obstacles thrown out by the FCC in an attempt to stop freedom's progress.
It's a positively medieval barricade impulse that led the FCC to try to stop the arrival of cable television in the 1970s, while on the Internet it's still hatching plan after plan to impose "net neutrality" on Internet providers, price controls that dictate how much providers can charge different kinds of customers.
The move to police the newsrooms is an effort to bring back the now-defunct "Fairness Doctrine," which forces station managers to air unpopular views outside the wishes of both owners and viewers.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
The FCC is simply a fascist propaganda tool of the democrat party!
DON’T STOP THERE...
How it got started. The Federal Radio Commission was the precursor to the FCC.
http://earlyradiohistory.us/sec023.htm
Early Government Regulation (1903-1941)
A much smaller agency with much less power can enforce decency regulations and station ownership limits(what few are left)
Seems to me that with all the digital media these days, many of the problems the FCC was supposed to deal with are gone anyway.
Yeah, except that most of them don't "lose" their original mission/purpose. The problem is that most of them are Trojan horses, whose real purpose is not their supposed "mission" when they are created.
For the FCC to even think about a plan like that warrants its shutdown.
I grew up the 1970’s when the FCC was going after stations on the basis of liberal Fairness Doctrine complaints.
This was RIchard NixOn’s FCC that actually shut down a radio station owned by a fundamentalist preacher who supported a military victory in Vietnam. His crime was probably not supporting Nixon’s “peace talks” with the commies.
Back then, I heard Dr. Carl McIntire and other victims of the FCC’s wrath call for a new agency strictly limited to regulating technical matters like interference with someone else’s frequency spectrum and nothing else.
The Radio Television News Directors Association and other voices of the MSM back then like “Broadcasting” magazine advocated that the First Amendment applied to broadcasters as well as the newspapers.
These bastards can’t (won’t) even enforce “Do Not Call.” Send them gold-plated evidence of wrongdoing, they sit on your complaint for about a year, then send you a letter saying that they couldn’t fix the problem.
Interesting history here.
http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa639.pdf
Broadcast Localism and the Lessons of the Fairness Doctrine
I’m not sure, but I suspect the FCC is also to blame for all the “public interest” advertising run by stations seeking to ensure license renewals. I wonder, too, if “diversity” requirements are not already responsible for some programming decisions.
Just like the NLRB, this agency’s “mission” at its core will only attract those of a certain political stripe. Their bias is built into the agency’s DNA.
Do not abolish the FCC. Just cut its budget 90% until it does its mission and answers to the people and the Congress.
Its quite interesting that a Republican on the FCC and some GOP congressman were quick to react to this “study” announcement last week.
Its because the Obama FCC was apparently trying to target the increasingly large portfolio of Sinclair Broadcasting Group.
Sinclair controls a large chunk of local television stations and local news across the country.
The new Obama chairman of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, has put on hold the planned sale of Channel 7 (WJLA) in Washington DC to Sinclair.
Sinclair’s ownership supports the GOPe and their candidates for office.
Sinclair stations aired the Swiftboat documentary that took a critical look at John Kerry’s Vietnam service during the 2004 election.
The Leftists have been beating the drums about “localism” attacking Clear Channel in radio and Sinclair in television for years.
A “study” like the FCC wanted was just a prelude to formal regulation so it was important to stop it.
I believe in everybody’s free speech because when I defend the free speech of the MSM or the RINOstream media like Fox, Sinclair and many talk shows, I defend my freedom of speech.
EVERYBODY’S FREEDOM IS EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS
Go FCC!
And take the EPA with you.
The FCC needs to be scaled back to assign frequencies so stations don’t interfere with one another.
That’s ALL they should do.
Is their a Sinclair network?
Oh they just have network affiliates airing Twerking with the Stars and American Gay Idol? or NBC Nightly News? How does this make them an alternative voice?
I had a friend who was working for a local radio station in 1980. It was the same station at which Rush Limbaugh had worked early in his career.
After Reagan was elected this guy told me that his station’s chief engineer was ecstatic. “Why”? I asked him.
“Because Reagan is gonna cut the FCC budget so low, in two years you’ll be able to listen to this station on Jupiter!”
Sadly his prediction did not come to pass.
Just Abolish The FCCAnd the EPA, DHS, ATF, DEA, NPR, etc.
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