The staff decision by the Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites) opens the way for the show to book two of the sexier candidates for California governor: Hollywood he-man Arnold Schwarzenegger (news) and porn-star Mary Carey.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.In other words, the Federal Government is not allowed to control your opinion, or your expression of it. If you want to buy a press--you probably have a printer hooked to your computer--and publish a newspaper you do not apply to the government for a license which the government is forbidden to require. Whether or not I or anyone else thinks you are "operating in the public interest."
The FCC--disposing governmental powers--was created to determine what use of electromagnetic spectrum is "in the public interest." It decided that you aren't allowed to transmit on almost any frequency, but that certain of its favored elite are awarded a title of nobility called a broadcast license--and everyone else is entitled to shut up and listen.
Your "right to know" is beautiful clothing for the presumption of the objectivity of journalism. But if I disagree with you, one or the other of us is wrong--and if we both have a right to talk, no one has the right to hear only the truth.
Even people who buy ink by the barrel are deterred at the prospect of arguing with other people who buy ink by the barrel. Thus the true nature of journalism is not truth but consensus; what you are told--on the Internet or in print or on the air--may be the truth, or simply an urban ledgend which somehow flatters the teller of it.
Nothing the FCC does would be constitutional if applied to print or to in-person speech. Everything the FCC does should therefore be subject to "strict scrutiny" of the courts.
The "objectivity" of journalism is a naked emperor, and the FCC should be sued and forced to bring its tendentious licensees under control. As interested as you may be in the results of voting on election day, for example, it is not in the interest of the proper conduct of elections that government-licensed broadcasters put their--and thus the government's--imprimatur on guesses or even factual truth about how other people have voted.
There is time enough, when the responsible officials have made their tallies, to report the facts after the polls are closed nationwide. Had that rule been followed on Election Day 2000 we would have known the result a month sooner than was in fact the case.