If You Need a Doctrine to Enforce Fairness, You’re Doing It Wrong.

If you’ve not heard of the Fairness Doctrine, you should probably acquaint yourself with a couple blog posts on it today. In short, Democrats want to force radio stations (and only radio stations for the present) to give “equal time” to competing political points of view. So, if a radio station has a conservative talk radio broadcaster on the air for three hours a day, the station has to have a left-wing show for three hours, too. If the station owner doesn’t respond immediately to complaints (and later in the post, we’ll see who the Dems are recruiting to generate those complaints), the government can take the station off the air and pull the owner’s license.

The left’s goal here is not to be fair but to push conservative shows off the radio airwaves by forcing station owners to run a stopwatch on anything but the most innocuous, mayonnaise programming. They want to stifle political speech using the power of the Federal Government in direct violation of both the letter and spirit of the First Amendment.

Of course, they have not suggested the same thing for the major media networks nor cable news. It’s only radio, and perhaps the internet, too.

Tabitha Hale is not at all pleased by the prospect and brings up a quote from Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow, who has a direct financial interest in squelching conservative talk radio. See, Senator Stabenow’s husband has tried and failed three times to push left-wing talk radio. The Fairness Doctrine would be money in the bank for him and her.

Meanwhile, Erick Erickson has found that the Democrats not only want control of radio stations but also of what is available on the internet. More, they’re going to rely on the extremist group MoveOn.org to troll for potential violations they can use to jack up station owners. Dan Collins notes that nowhere in MoveOn.orgs hit list can we find either PBS or NPR. They lean heavily left, so they’re immune from the so-called fairness edicts of our increasingly totalitarian Democratic overlords.

Tags: cen, Fairness Doctrine, Happy Fascism, Progressives