Posted by
Steve on Thursday, May 14, 2009 9:11:46 AM
The second of the three disasters that are facing our country is the reimposition of the Fairness Doctrine. The other two are the appointment of the Supreme Court Justice and the destruction of the best medical system in the world.
The “Fairness Doctrine” was in place for a long time. It required radio stations to balance talk shows. If they had a show with a conservative opinion, they had to balance that with a liberal show. As a result, radio stations were not willing to take the risk over the determination if they had met the standard. They just did not have talk shows that dealt with political speech at all.
Ronald Reagan came along and said that was not acceptable. The First Amendment to the Constitution says that there shall be no law abridging Freedom of Speech. Since this law obviously did just that, he had the law repealed. After the law was repealed, talk radio took off and is now the number one radio format in the country. Interestingly, conservative talk radio has been successful while liberal talk radio has not. That has resulted in well over 90% of the talk shows being conservative shows. All of the most popular talk show hosts are conservative.
When the current administration and Congress was elected, there was a lot of talk about bringing the Fairness Doctrine back. That got shot down in quick order by the fans of talk radio. Since it is the number one listened to format in the country, there were a lot of calls and letters to Congressmen. In quick order, Congress responded with bills that said they would not put the Fairness Doctrine back in place. That should have ended it, but liberals do not give up easily when they almost have total control.
There is more than one way to get the Fairness Doctrine imposed, without actually imposing it. There is talk of having radio licenses being renewed every two years instead of every eight years. That would mean the liberals would have more chances to get the station to drop conservative talk radio. This might work, but would have to be put with some other method to have any real teeth.
The second way to bring the Fairness Doctrine back would be to have local Community Review Boards. These review boards would determine if a station has enough “local” programming. If this was paired with more frequent renewal of the license, it could have a big impact on whether a station could keep conservative talk radio.
A third way is being discussed. That is to require more minority ownership of radio stations. The thinking here is that minorities would be less likely to have conservative talk radio as their radio format of choice. That would then reduce the amount of conservative talk radio. Conservative talk radio is highly profitable for a radio station. Any station owner who wanted to make money would see quickly that it pays to have conservative talk radio on the air. This might work, but it would most likely have to be paired with something else to really work.
There are others. The problem is that if the liberals pull off the removal of conservative talk radio, there will be no place to get real news. All you will get are liberal talking points from liberal news outlets. The liberal news outlets get their news from the Democrat Party. All dissent would be stopped in the country and you would have a one party rule. We would be like the old Soviet Union with Pravda, only our news outlets would be voluntary arms of the government.
If the liberals get conservative talk radio, the internet is next. The internet would be much easier than talk radio. There will be no outcry, because there will be nobody to find out and report it. Even if someone did find out and report it, things take time on the internet. Things happen almost instantly on the radio. There would be no way to stop them.