Free Republic

SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER (D-WV): "There's a little bug inside of me which wants to get the FCC to say to FOX and to MSNBC: 'Out. Off. End. Goodbye.' It would be a big favor to political discourse; to our ability to do our work here in Congress; and to the American people, to be able to talk with each other and have some faith in their government and more importantly, in their future."

Jon Leibowitz, chairman of Barack Obama's Federal Trade Commission, is at the epicenter of a quiet movement to subsidize news organizations, a first step toward government control of the media. In our book, "2010: Take Back America -- A Battle Plan," we reported that he had commissioned a study to examine plans for a federal subsidy for news organizations. Among the measures under consideration are special tax treatment, exemption from anti-trust laws and changes in copyright laws. Now Leibowitz has begun to pounce. A May 24 working paper on "reinventing" the media proposes that the government impose fees on websites,...

Michigan State Senator Bruce Patterson (R-Lansing) has introduced legislation that would empower the state government to license and regulate journalists. Patterson claims the legislation is necessary because “an increasing fragmentation of the sources of information is confusing the average person. The legitimate media are being drowned out by an army of amateurs. The Internet has made it affordable for anyone with access to a computer to promulgate his voice. Readers don’t know who they can trust, who to believe.” Patterson’s bill aims to reduce the difficulty of knowing who to trust by having the state license those authorized to report...

The White House escalated its offensive against Fox News on Sunday by urging other news organizations to stop "following Fox" and instead join the administration's attempt to marginalize the channel. White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told CNN that President Obama does not want "the CNNs and the others in the world [to] basically be led in following Fox." Obama senior adviser David Axelrod went further by calling on media outlets to join the administration in declaring that Fox is "not a news organization." "Other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way," Axelrod counseled ABC's...