La Shawn Barber and various others are posting about the latest ham-fisted proposal from our newly elected Democratic Congress. It seems that legislation is being proposed to re-instate the “fairness doctrine” to radio, to force broadcasters to compensate the popularity of conservative talk-radio with equal time and access to liberal counterparts..
This basically means forcing owners to either drop Rush Limbaugh or use the show's revenues to subsidize the Al Frankens of the world who generate no audience, and hence generate no advertising revenue.
The whole idea is absurdly stupid on so many levels. Aside from it being demonstrably unprincipled, the intent of such legislation would never achieve its goal, which has nothing to do with fairness, but everything to do with changing the rules of the game because you are losing. Technology is constantly creating new and diverse means of communication: blogs, satellite radio, podcasts, YouTube. If there is a message that wants to be heard, it will find a channel that doesn't fall under some regulatory bucket.
And it’s not as if there aren’t already well established and entrenched venues for liberal spin.
From Iowahawk:
Let's face it, Bush had hate radio and "fair and balanced" Fox pushing him during the entire campaign. To counteract the incessant bias of "Faux News," Democrats need to have their own media voice. I've got an idea -- why not line up three or four television network news organizations, a couple of weekly news magazines and a dozen or so major newspapers to run non-stop anti-GOP stories? I know it sounds crazy, but it just might work.
Just from a tactical point of view , this legislation is an obvious non-starter. Talk-radio has a very good record of quickly mobilizing the ire of citizens to shoot down bad legislation. One can only imagine how listener's will respond when they hear that the show they are tuning in and listening to everyday is about to be targeted for censorship. Defeating this will be like shooting ducks in a barrel.