Posted on 12/16/2010 7:03:28 AM PST by RatherBiased.com
‘What we have had in recent years is an aberration in which we’ve had no oversight of media.” So says FCC commissioner Michael Copps, who is now advocating the institution of a quadrennial “public-value test” for broadcasters. If he gets his way, stations across the country could be put on probation, and subsequently denied FCC licensing, for failure to meet a broad set of criteria involving local coverage, percentage of resources devoted to news, and several kinds of disclosure.
Speaking to Betty Kays of the BBC’s World News America, Copps, a Democrat, explained his reasoning. Journalism is, he said, in its hour of “grave peril.” The “American media has a bad case of substance abuse. . . . We are not producing the body of news and information that democracy needs to conduct its civic dialog. . . . We’re going to be pretty close to denying our citizens the essential news and information that they need to have in order to make intelligent decisions,” he added.
This has raised speculation on the right that Copps hopes to effect that perennial leftist dream — the revivification of the Fairness Doctrine, which from 1928 until 1987 allowed government regulators to carefully police radio stations to ensure equal allocation of time to opposing political viewpoints, and whose destruction during the Reagan years permitted the emergence of talk radio as we now know it.
Copps denies an intention to revive the Fairness Doctrine, but the end of that policy was part of the “aberration” — the communications deregulation — he referred to.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
The FCC will single-handedly and without Congressional approval destroy the Conservative voices in this country. We cannot trust the MSM any more than we can trust our government.
Like the t-shirt says, “Our forefathers would be shooting by now.”
Also see: my tagline.
How about the Second? (just kidding.........I think)
Well, there will always be pirate radio and shortwave. B-P
It will never stop. We will be fighting this stuff 50 years from now. They never give up.
Yeah, just what we need, Government deciding “the body of news and information that democracy needs to conduct its civic dialog.” Sounds like tyranny to me!
No Subsidy for NPR
By Jeff Jacoby (Archive) · Thursday, November 25, 2010
A bill pulling the plug on federal funding for National Public Radio was thwarted last week when the lame-duck Democratic majority in the US House of Representatives voted down a Republican effort to bring the measure to the floor. Introduced last summer by Colorado Republican Doug Lamborn, the legislation would bar NPR and its local affiliates from spending federal dollars on NPR programming. Of course there was never any chance that a bill targeting one of the nation’s most prominent left-of-center institutions would pass while Democrats still controlled the House. But a GOP majority is taking over in January, and ending NPR’s taxpayer subsidies ought to be high on its to-do list.
NPR tarnished its reputation last month when it abruptly fired commentator Juan Williams, an engaging liberal who had conceded in an interview that he gets “worried” and “nervous” when he boards a plane and sees passengers “who are in Muslim garb.” Williams is nobody’s idea of a bigot — among other things, he is the author of “Eyes on the Prize,” a famous history of the civil rights movement — and NPR’s reaction was widely regarded as highhanded, dogmatic, and hypocritical. It only made matters worse when NPR CEO Vivian Schiller told an audience in Atlanta that Williams should have kept his feelings between himself and “his psychiatrist or his publicist.” (She later apologized.)
In the wake of such a public-relations fiasco, one might have expected NPR to react to the House vote protecting its government funding with a modest statement of appreciation. Instead it issued a statement so pompous and illogical that it could have been drafted in Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.
“Today, good judgment prevailed as Congress rejected a move to assert government control over the content of news,” it declared. “Public radio’s value in fostering an informed society has never been more critical. Our growing audience shows that we are meeting that need. It is imperative for federal funding to continue to ensure that this essential tool of democracy remains available to all.”
The arrogance of that statement is exceeded only by its speciousness. “A move to assert government control”? Lamborn’s bill was just the opposite: a move to end the government’s entangling financial alliance with NPR, leaving it responsible for its own budget and programming. If NPR’s “value ... has never been more critical,” why isn’t its “growing audience” supporting it directly? And if NPR is such an “essential tool of democracy,” how did the republic survive for so long without it?
Notwithstanding NPR’s haughty air of entitlement, there are at least four reasons why its taxpayer subsidies should end.
1. They aren’t fair. Other radio stations and networks, from Air America to Clear Channel to Univision to Westwood One, must sink or swim in a competitive market. They survive only if listeners and advertisers value what they do. Uncle Sam doesn’t keep them afloat with tens of millions of dollars annually in direct and indirect subsidies. If they can operate without government welfare, NPR can too.
2. They aren’t appropriate. In a free society, especially one with a robust tradition of press freedom, the very idea of government-underwritten media should be anathema. When news organizations depend on largesse from the treasury, there is inevitably a price paid in objectivity, fairness, and journalistic independence.
3. They aren’t necessary. NPR’s partisans claim that public broadcasting provides valuable news and educational content that listeners can’t get anywhere else. That may have been a plausible argument in 1970. It is utterly implausible today, when audio programming of every description can be found amid a vast and dizzying array of outlets: terrestrial and satellite radio, Internet broadcasting, podcasts, and audio downloads.
4. They aren’t affordable. At a time of trillion-dollar federal deficits and a national debt of nearly $14 trillion, NPR’s government subsidies cannot possibly be justified. All the more so when public broadcasting attracts a fortune in private funding, from the gifts of innumerable “listeners like you” to the $200 million bequeathed to NPR by the late Joan Kroc in 2003.
More than anything else, the incoming 112th Congress has a mandate to stem the flood of red ink that is drowning Washington in debt. The tax dollars consumed by NPR are admittedly a drop in the enormous fiscal bucket. But if Congress can’t even do away with a frill like subsidies for public radio, how will it stand a prayer of shoving far more formidable gluttons away from the federal trough?
These two intellectual powerhouses will tell us what can be on the radio.
Pray for America.
The 1st Amendment protects freedom of the "press", the electronic media did not exist then. It is a logical extension of the first amendment that our "leadership" has not seen fit to make. The justification of the FCC was originally to prevent interferance between stations and to license use of "public airwaves" (there is limited frequency spectrum). Non-broadcast media, like the internet and TV transmitted over fiber optics should not be lumped in with things broadcast over the RF spectrum. This is about muzzling the "Conservative" voice, and must be stopped.
Please paste it “formatted”.
And no one asks where in the Constitution this is allowed?
We are not producing the body of news and information that democracy needs to conduct its civic dialog. . . . We’re going to be pretty close to denying our citizens the essential news and information that they need to have in order to make intelligent decisions,” he added.”
When these totalitarians get control there will be no civic dialogue. Only state approved news and discourse. With the old media no longer being the gatekeepers of information flow our rulers are now terribly vexed. Time to yanks the uppity peasants back into line.
The First Amendment is about preventing censorship of pornography, and stopping Anti-Abortion people from protesting! < /Liberal>
This is just one of those issues that could really drive a person over the edge because it’s such an out-right move towards suppression of thought and speech by un-elected bureaucrats.
Sounds like a bleeding heart liberal that is not happy about getting kicked to the curb.
When Beck and Limbaugh are finally forced to call their supporters out into the streets, they are gonna rue the day...
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