The echoes of the garbled oath of office have hardly wafted away, but the Democrats are talking "fairness doctrine".
In an exchange between Bill Press and Senator Debbie Stabenow, they discuss bringing back the so-called “fairness doctrine”. They are avidly in favor of doing so. Bill Press says we should “bring accountability to the airwaves.” And, he asks Stabenow if she will push for hearings. Will she? ….”Yep”.
There is a lot of talk about transparency in Washington today. It just sounds so…well, upright. However, Debbie does not disclose a conflict of interest. Her husband, Tom Athans, has interests in the radio field. In fact, he is co-founder of Democracy Radio and is a former Air American Radio executive, which declared bankruptcy. He is now with Talk USA Radio, which he co-founded. (Info from Wikipedia) None of these endeavors seem to have been very successful, commercially speaking. Getting rid of the competition would help.
Seems the dems are not happy with just having their predominant speech in the Congress, Senate and the Executive branch. It isn’t enough for their president to command the airwaves anytime he chooses to talk to the citizenry. The bully pulpit is very powerful. It is not enough to have the predominantly left leaning newspapers in their corner. It is not enough to have the TV news channels throwing out their propaganda 24/7. They want to shut up the comparatively few voices in talk radio. The reason is, of course, that those voices have points of view that differ from all the lefties, and those points of view make common sense.
The thought of “fairness” in the TV world is intriguing. Can you imagine the News With Michael Savage and Wolf Blitzer? How about the News With Katie Couric and Anne Coulter?
The thought of “fairness” coming to the coven of “The View” is delicious. It would feature two or three conservatives and the same number of liberals. As it is now, the cauldron is being stirred by four liberals and a lonely conservative, who is often out-shouted.
Think of Hollywood being forced to observe the doctrine. Half the actors would be out of work if they had to employ some conservatives. Half the work now given to Susan Sarandan; half the work to Sean Penn. Maybe the Hollywood conservatives could come out of the closet and get work again. It would only be fair that the scriptwriters, producers, and all who work on the films be half and half.
And, the newspapers. Half the coverage to conservative news. It would probably save them from the sure bankruptcy looming ahead for them. They refuse to present balanced news. Maybe if they were forced to do so, they would get some readership back and make some money.
In the sixties the lefties were on campus yelling about free speech. Of course, they had it, or nobody would have ever heard of them. Once they got into positions of power, free speech was forgotten for conservatives. Professors now are predominantly leftist. Time to turn that around with “fairness”. All the deans, professors, etc., would have to be certified half and half.
Can you see SNL with a conservative cast?
How about twelve hours a day NPR/PBS? Subscribers would probably pay for it, without any subsidy from the U.S. government.
Could this work? No, because the lefties would be in charge of determining what was fair. We have seen what they consider fair. They are very good at naming things what they are not.
Now, to transparency. The president promised it. However, there is a humongous “stimulus”, (aka pork), bill in Congress right now. Nobody really knows what is in the bill, as it is reportedly about six hundred pages long. However, the president tells us that we have to get this done right now or we are going into depression. Wasn’t that the same line used in the first bailout? The electorate is getting fed up with the “ wolf” calling bit.
Mayor Daley of Chicago has said his list of projects will not be made public. He says that they will not put it out, because once you do that, the newspapers and the media are going to be ripping it apart. He said it is very controversial. Isn’t that the job of the papers and media, to shine some light on spending given by taxpayers? Some transparency.
Murdoch and Soros can afford to finance talk radio shows. They don’t seem so inclined. They are hard businessmen and know that liberal talk radio is not entertaining or even enlightening. Why lose money on it?
So Bill Press and Debbie can dream on about getting their leftist views out farther. They have freedom of speech. It’s just that not many want to hear it. This is always the mindset of lefties; if they can’t get it any other way, get the government to mandate it and force it down the throats of the taxpayers.
Is this the “over-reaching” that the lefties have always warned conservatives about? From all reports, the taxpayers are not only getting restless, they are getting steamed.
Barbara regularly writes for CapitolHillCoffeeHouse. She also appears in California Chronicle, Border Patrol, and Citizens Caucus. Her primary interest is illegal immigration, but she writes about other subjects as well.
Barbara lives in a large city on the West Coast. Her loyalties are with God, family, country, heritage and borders.
She enjoys music, painting, poetry and song writing.
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