Securing The Airwaves
July 5, 2007
Last week sane Americans really angered those imbecilic, arrogant and entitled elitists in the Washington DC Amnesty cabal. Any real American knew that the traitors promising to “secure our borders” were just self-interested serial liars.
In reaction to the overwhelming grassroots outcry for sanity, those same liars are seeking vengeance on the not-so-silent majority by resurrecting the Fairness Doctrine.
Introduced in 1949, and mercifully euthanized by the Reagan Administration in 1987, the “Fairness Doctrine” was a regulation that required broadcasters airing political opinions to give "equal time" to “opposing” views, with the FCC bureaucrats defining “equal” and “opposing”.
Hey...if being elected fails to make you a God, you might as well try a coup d'état.
It should come as no great surprise that the Beltway Bozos are taking another pass at screwing the public for the sake of “securing” themselves.
First we have House Speaker Lollapelosi propagandizing that “Most of us here are at the mercy of hate radio every day of the week and that takes its toll” and then Trenchmouth Lott lamented that “Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.”
Elevating the far-left talent for duplicitous lying is Senator Bernie Sanders (an opportunist extraordinaire):
When you own a newspaper you can do anything you want. It’s your newspaper and that’s what the Constitution is about.
But when you have a radio or television network and when the airwaves are owned by the people, and when you got permission to use those airwaves from the FCC, there are obviously requirements.
In a nation that is politically divided, people in this country have a right to hear all points of view and not just a corporate right-wing point of view.” (NPR 06/27/07)
This is typically simplistic Beltway BS.
The impetus for the 1949 enactment of the doctrine initially grew from a concern that there were only a limited number of frequencies available for radio and television broadcasting. Consequently, the FCC took the position that, in allocating these frequency assignments to the private sector the, “...station licensees were ‘public trustees’, and as such had an obligation to afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of contrasting points of view on controversial issues of public importance.”
In 1949, there were 2,881 radio and 98 television stations. At the end of 2006...there were 27,807 licensed television and radio broadcast stations. This does not include cable distribution, internet distribution, podcasts or satellite.
In the simplest of terms...in 2007, there is no shortage of room on the information highway.
And speaking of highways....
If one were to follow the illogic of Bernie Sanders to its logical conclusion...the New York Times, once printed, is distributed on PUBLIC roadways. If there is a single public resource in tight supply, it is space on the congested roads and highways of New York. Ipso facto...since the roads are “owned by the people”, “when you get permission to use those” roads from the motor vehicle department...“there are obviously requirements”.
“In a nation that is politically divided, people in this country have a right to hear all points of view and not just a corporate left-wing point of view from Pinch Salzberger.”
Ergo...let’s regulate all free speech.
The whines and whispers for the reintroduction of the Fairness Doctrine are nothing more than an attempt by a coalition of elitists to control the info-pabulum that you are fed.
With no shame, these Beltway oligarchs are desperately trying to put the information genie back into the bottle. It’s only a matter of time before they spread their regulation infection into the internet.
They are trying to reassert their arrogant control over the populace in the name of democracy.
Or, as Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin dissembles, “It's time to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine. I have this old-fashioned attitude that when Americans hear both sides of the story, they're in a better position to make a decision.”
If both sides of the story equal the Democrats and the Republicans...that is often the same story benefiting the same small group of arrogant elitists...time and time again.
What the American people need and are starting to get is “all sides of the story”. And this is what the Fairness Doctrine threatens to usurp.
And I thought that primogeniture and entail left these shores in 1776 with the Tories.
In their book, The Right Nation, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge were clear that our Founding Fathers...didn't just kick out the British; they kicked out the legal trappings of the feudal social order — primogeniture, entail, titles of nobility, the established church and the rest of it. They based their republic on two revolutionary principles — that all men are created equal and that power ultimately derives from the will of "the people."
Sadly, this is a lesson that those idiots who have been in DC far too long must learn anew.