FCC Aims to Open the Door to Federal Control Over Television Media

One of America's greatest assets is its free market media. News and other television media groups can operate fairly freely under the First Amendment. Now the new FCC chairman, Michael Copps, is considering strict federal controls over broadcasters that would put them under stringent controls aimed at making them more publicly responsible (at least as far as the federal government is concerned.) Copps' issue is news. He believes that news is not as good as it used to be and that it fails to properly inform the public.

Who does this guy think he is? America's news outlets serve the public as it wants to be served. Fox and MSNBC are the obvious targets here. Note Senator Rockefeller's diatribe last month which seems to point to these very proposals.

We live in a free society based on choice. We do not need the FCC run by a Joseph Goebbels. We the people simply wish to be left alone. He wants pressure groups to have government sanctioned influence over the news and entertainment choices offered by the media.

Left wingers blame the news for last year's election. They will do anything possible to manipulate the media. They simply cannot believe that people can inform themselves and make their own choices.

Last, but not least, this is a constitutional issue. The federal government wants to control the message, violating the First Amendment in the process. This must not happen.

The Orwell Doctrine

George Orwell's novel 1984 reflects the fears of his time, a resurgence of totalitarian regimes. The dictatorship he created was based both upon the terrifying regimes of Hitler and Stalin complete with a personality cult around the unreachable Leader named Big Brother. Totalitarian regimes love to play with words, for example the People's Republic of China was one of the main perpetrators of massacre and artificial famine in the past century. It had much to do with the power of Mao and nothing to do with helping the people.

Obama is not Mao, nor is he Hitler nor is he Stalin. However, he and his Democratic Party want to attack basic freedoms and cloak these efforts with language. The Left are itching to reenact what they call the "Fairness Doctrine."

This doctrine emerged in the late 1940s as a power assumed by the Federal Communications Commission to force radio broadcasters to grant equal time to all sides of a political issue. If enforced today, this would force a radio station to provide three hours to a liberal host if they run the Rush Limbaugh show for three hours. Local boards would be erected to ensure fair access.

It is telling that liberal presidencies and Supreme Courts have supported the concept while conservatives have opposed it. In the 1980s the Reagan Administration revoked the doctrine, citing the fact that it violated a radio station's right to free speech and also inhibited a station's right to operate in a free market. This allowed a proliferation of conservative talk shows to emerge on AM radio in the 1990s that proved popular and profitable. Meanwhile, well-funded attempts to establish liberal talk radio failed miserably. Seems that people did not want to listen to their ideas.

This attempt to squelch conservative radio is an outrage. If President Bush had used government action to silence Michael Moore or the liberal newspapers, the nation would have risen in outrage whether they agreed with the liberals' ideas or not. It's a question of free speech. Left wingers now have started feeling their power and arrogantly want to display it. It will start with the radio. Next they will come after people's guns. Then what? One shudders to think.