Free Speech Vs. Fairness Dogma

Free Speech Vs. Fairness Dogma




By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, February 10, 2009 4:20 PM PT

First Amendment: Beyond the various threats that President Obama has said require confrontation — financial, military, nuclear, climate — another danger looms large: Those in his party who want government to muzzle dissent.


A lot has changed in the two decades since the federal government stopped requiring broadcast licensees to provide varied viewpoints within their programming.

Talk radio, for instance, has become a counterweight to the liberal establishment media. Blogs have allowed anyone and everyone to become a pundit with no limit to the number of readers who can be reached. And Fox News has overwhelmed CNN and the Big Three networks on American TV screens.

Stabenow: Eyeing the airwaves.
Liberal politicians see it all — rightly — as a threat to their power. And so the scheming for a new "Fairness Doctrine" on steroids has begun in earnest.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., in an interview last week with liberal radio host and former CNN "Crossfire" co-host Bill Press, said: "I absolutely think it's time to be bringing accountability to the airwaves."

When Press asked if he could depend on the senator to push for hearings on the issue, Stabenow indicated that she had already discussed the matter with fellow senators "and, you know, I feel like that's gonna happen. Yep."

Is it an exaggeration to say that mulling the notion of restricting political speech is a practice more suited to the Reich stag of Nazi Berlin than the Congress of Barack Obama's Washington?

Sad to say, when the McCain-Feingold campaign law was enacted in 2002 and endorsed by a 5-4 liberal majority on the Supreme Court the next year, it signaled to politicians that restrictions on political speech were OK in America.

There is also an obvious conflict of interest: Stabenow's husband, Tom Athans, is co-founder of the liberal TalkUSA radio network and served as executive vice president of the liberal Air America network — now bankrupt because so few Americans were interested in listening to its left-wing versions of Sean Hannity and Michael Reagan.

With hundreds of billions of dollars of stimulus being spent on every imaginable Democratic wish item, does Stabenow see some loot available from the taxpayers' pockets to subsidize her husband's radio ventures (since they can't seem to succeed on their own)?

Stabenow is by no means alone among congressional Democrats in yearning for a return to the days of the Fairness Doctrine.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., has remarked that "the public discussion was at a higher level and more intelligent in those days than it has become since." The 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John Kerry, has said "the Fairness Doctrine ought to be there, and I also think the equal-time doctrine ought to come back."

Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., a member of the House telecommunications subcommittee, has also promised to work on bringing back a revamped version of the Fairness Doctrine. Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Human Events political editor John Gizzi that she personally supported the Fairness Doctrine.

As Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., a former broadcaster, stated in reaction to Stabenow's comments, "Congress has no business pursuing hearings on censorship of our radio airwaves."

Don't bet on Pence's Broadcaster Freedom Act, prohibiting a new Fairness Doctrine, getting a vote in Pelosi's House of Representatives. Pence guarantees that if it did, it would "surely pass, because every time freedom gets a vote in the People's House, freedom always wins."

We can think of another effective way to shut down all this outrageous talk of regulating political discussion in America: a bold statement from our new president to those in his party making it clear that the "change" he is bringing to Washington must not include government meddling in the sources of information that free people choose for themselves.



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