Fairness Doctrine Floats Back to the Top
 

http://www.politico.com/blogs/michae...ine_back_.html

Ok, I though most liberals supported the First Amendment. I could be wrong. The free market is just that, anyone is free to gather the resources, start a show and make money for the radio station, or not. In the case of Air America's failed attempt it would be "or not". There are plenty of smaller radio programs with a bit of liberal vs. conservative slant but for some reason few of them have ever made it big. NPR comes the closest, but I don't consider them to be completely liberal in their delivery, and I listen to it every day, most of the time twice a day and on the weekends. So why the need for government control of the messages on the airwaves. It strikes me as an attempt at censorship.

From what I've heard this does seem to be less than fair. If there is a fixed amount of airtime and it is currently full, then there cannot be any addition without subtraction. If they are going to force or dictate to the stations more liberal or any other type of programming by legislation, than something that is already there must be removed. If that is what they are talking about, I don't like it.

I'll have to wait to see the actual bill itself.

"Fair" is just a buzz word for "we don't like your domination of the market and we don't like what you are saying".

Will this doctrine also apply to television, print and every other media outlet available? I just don't understand it all and I don't have time to look into it right now.

In a nutshell, wiki does a pretty good job of presenting both sides.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine

I don't think very much of wiki lately - especially after what happened with UT and his updates getting repeatedly removed. Very weak. Sad really.

yea, I can't stop thinking about that either. But I don't think that was wiki per se, but another contributor just like UT thwarting his efforts.

In the end, once I had a citation I was sort of armed, and got the information into the article, though in a different section than I thought warranted.

It didn't have to be an editing war; I could have maybe gone into the talk pages and discussed it there.

Okay. But why were you quoting a bunch of democrat congressmen?

They're about as "liberal" as Bush was "conservative".

I missed the whole episode. What were you trying to amend?

As far as the fairness doctrine goes, it is a problem created by first regulation which concentrated power down from thousands of small players to hundreds and then partial deregulation which killed off the remaining small players leaving us with very few enormous players. When the original regulation occurred they recognized one problem, they were limiting access to what had been a free arena. Their solution, the fairness doctrine, served the two major parties very nicely. After partial deregulation the Republicans adapted to the new ground rules and seized hate radio. Now the Democrats want their piece of the action back... fairness has little to do with it.

Typical bullshit victimhood mentality of Dems. Free market forces drive the popularity of radio, who ever broadcasts it regardless of content.

There is no free market in radio, Limbaugh figured out how to be entertaining and provide cheap content first. He did what he was supposed to do.

Who cares about Limbaugh. That is not the topic of discussion. Radio is driven by one thing, advertising. Once anyone captures a subject that gathers listeners the radio station can sell adverts.

...except that the adverts are sold by Clear Channel not the local station. Limbaugh understood this first. Local radio no longer exists in any meaningful way. Content comes from a few mega-providers.

It was a 45? -year-old mayor who was found to have been gay-boning an 18-year-old. We were in the midst of finding news that erased the party affiliation. The Wikipedia entry had been cleansed of party affiliation, so I found it and put it into the entry. It was immediately cleansed again, the "excuse" being that the position of mayor was non-partisan. I found a cite from his own biography and placed the affiliation in a lower section of the entry. That must have stuck because it wasn't removed.

Still a free market, even if you don't like it. Go start your own radio station with a different stance or approach on the issues, hey, you could call it Air America. See how that works out for ya. Typical BS. It is about have's and have-not's. Market forces drive the industry. I know since we don't like mega corps to own the airwaves let's just let the Federal Government control it!

There have been numerous studies on the adverse impact of radio ownership consolidation as a result of the Federal Communications Act that deregulated ownership.

- far less local content and local ownership
- far less diversity of content

The top four radio station owners now have nearly half of the listeners nationwide...with packaged programming.

IMO, that is not the best use of the public airwaves.

I dont know that the return of the Fairness Doctrine is the answer.

I do believe that there should be a return to restrictions on ownership (number of stations a company can own in one market) and far greater open competition and access for licensing.

The public airwaves are not a commodity that should be controlled by a small number of mega-corps.

You can't start a radio station in America, it is verboten. The Feds control access to the air waves. For the most part mega-corps control the content. The Air America disaster was a Democrat attempt to follow the Limbaugh prototype. They sucked and lacked Limbaugh's timing. I don't support the fairness doctrine but I also don't support the Feds protecting corporations from competitors. We need to loosen up the license distribution for low and medium power radio if we want a freer market. Radio is a closed market enforced by the Feds. The fairness doctrine is a democrat solution for a democrat problem not an attempt at free speech protection.

Great minds think alike!

Radio ownership consolidation has not provide any benefits to the public...and it is the public airwaves!

Yeah. Careful though, I've been known to tear off a libertarian rant that'd make Radar look like a commie. :)

What if the shows were not broadcast through the airwaves? Then what? Any changes to the content of the shows by the Feds?

For the last few years nearly everyone that I know that listens to Rush or Glenn or whoever on radio have used the MP3s, not the airwaves.

Most corporate buildings ( That I've worked in anyway ) tend not to be places that recieve a consistent and strong signal through the airwaves. For a short period those listeners at work would listen to the streaming show through the computer. It didn't take long for that to cease via tightening the screws on the LAN.

Downloading the MP3s is a good way at listening to the shows nowdays and I've even seen employees scoot home to download or capture the shows on file and bring it back to work to distribute.

If the Feds clamp down on the airwaves it seems possible that there is a big loophole for what the Dems hope to accomplish just by using the electronic files generated of the show.

There will surely be some type of business snag here and there to get around but those big broadcasters have been preparing for this new doctrine for some time. The re-introduction of this is not some big surprise.

I'm not convinced that there will be all that big of changes that listeners think about this.

What would be the alternate method of silencing the shows after converting to MP3 only? Who knows. The only thing for sure is that yes, this is having an impact and the gov't knows it.

How they are going to stomp it, that's the only real question.

The issue for me is the public airwaves...because they are public, I think they should provide a greater public benefit than has been demonstrated by ownership consolidation.

I have no interest in regulating the internet for content or site ownership.

It seems quite reasonable that the only issue for you is the airwaves. There are many in the gov't that would like to see the content disappear. That's both Rs and Ds at different times.

We'll see if the content is an issue after this new doctrine passes.

My money is on...."it's the content". Especially after the lib radio falls flat again, even with the new regulations.

I dont think a new Fairness Doctrine has any chance of passage.

At best (or worst) we might see FCC regulations rolling back the number of stations that a company can own in a local market.

The bulk of the audience for AM radio, including political talk, is well into their 70s.

I was flipping that aspect around in my head. Is it the medium or the message? Satellite radio doesn't look healthy either.

We don't have any interesting radio options in my area. I listen to NPR News on FM, which only covers Albany news which is a couple hours away along with the canned national content. We have nationally canned classic rock and metal, nationally canned pop, and nationally canned country. The am news radio is national canned nonsense plus a local whiner show. Oh we also get canned sports radio from FOX and ESPN. I believe ESPN took over the nationally canned Air America signal.

Defending the internet is obviously job one, but does radio have to be irrelevent?

To fucking bad. Lets just let the Feds take over and tell us what to think and hear. Great idea.

Lighten up, dude.

I said I dont think returning the Fairness Doctrine is a good idea.

I do think the deregulation in the early 90s harmed competition at the expense of local ownership and local content.

Rolling back the ownership rules and lowering the number of stations that any one company can own in a single market to provide greater competition is hardly letting the Feds take over.

Selling radio licenses to operate on the public airwaves should not be like selling cars or beer.

Sar/didn't we just do that for the last 8 years?/casm

Yea, totally sar/ /casm.

I just deliver it differently.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown. On Michael Savage's talk show discussing the Fairness Doctrine, Former Governor Moonbeam actually said "A little state control never hurt anybody."

http://boortz.com/nealz_nuze/2009/02...-doctrine.html

:lol:

It's getting its impetus from the creeping feeling that the nation as a whole is no longer behind the left-liberal, big-government paradigm, the way it was in the Thirties and Forties. What they're unable to acknowledge is this is because of a couple generations' experience with it now, and the greater part of the population is now sure this is not in line with what they value in life, let alone in politics.

So the creepier corners of the left-of-center demographic hope to create a government monopoly on information by this means -- the classic twentieth-century information dictatorship, all the while withholding the information that that is what this is, however small it be writ. The thinking is, I believe, forty years out of date in itself, and it exhibits the final failure of the "progressives (always to be understood as chiefly progressive of the power of the omnicompetent State)" to remake humanity in the image they'd like. Now they're trying to mandate advertisement for their nostrums by Federal law, since they can't sell it in the market. This is a failure more profound than they seem to comprehend, but comprehension of anything outside their limited circle of ideas is not a left-liberal strong suit, is it?

No, in fact I think your whole premise is wrong and you built your entire post upon a faulty assumption.

More than just the post- his entire worldview.

That was GREAT! It mixed narrow-mindedness, paranoia, and utter partisanship in one concise post!

Can I steal that? I bet I could get banned at DU again in about 20 seconds.

TGRR, incomprehension on your part doesn't equal incorrectness on mine. If you can't follow the idea, there is something important that you missed. I don't know exactly what that something is, but my God, your complacency is both misplaced, and highly convenient to people I don't think you'd want running important parts of your life.

None of this is some vast leftwing conspiracy. It's nothing so organized. It's a cultural mindset. The Left isn't getting its way any more, it's not leading the national opinion the way it used to, and some of them have hit on the idea of "well, we'll make 'em listen to us, by law!"

And its proponents are saying "oh no, we won't be shutting down anybody..." going on to name a couple of people usually, and that immediately sets off the bullshit alarms. We've heard the "Oh, no, we're not going to have (negative effect X)" routine before, and the negative effect shows up anyway. NRA people are particularly experienced in this regard, likewise the JPFO.

Sounds like cooler heads are beginning to prevail on this score, though. It's losing steam fast, which probably means email traffic to Congressmen's offices is well up and vociferously disapproving of the whole idea.

When you know Washington is never permanently working in your interest, that's not paranoia. "Narrow-mindedness" here seems to mean "of enough wisdom to disagree with TGRR about something." "Utter partisanship?" Lose the "utter," and never talk of it like it was a bad thing -- there are people cluttering up offices in Washington who shouldn't merit your support, and it's amazing how many of them are socialists who call themselves Democrats. TGRR, they ain't worth it. The Left is sinking into a collective maladjustment, and there's no health in them.

Notice that no part of your post carries anything remotely resembling a refutation of what I set forth in mine -- all you have expressed is the ill-advised refusal to credit something that may be wiser or more realistic than your take on it.

I recently ran across mention of something in Faust: Mephistopheles tells Faust, "Aye -- think so still, till experience change thy mind."

Monkey, I'll take mine over yours ten billion times; I pursue quality ideas, whereas what are you satisfied with? I sharply question the idea, HM, that you've chosen anything truly worth keeping; I don't see that anything I've chosen sucks, and I doubt you could show it. What you do show me is an attachment to, well, shoddy thought. I see this kind of second-bestness from the people who bellow at me constantly.

I reject leftist ideas on their merits. What's your story?

And your idea of a better premise and assumption would be...?

Anything you haven't said.

Shall we review the past two election results? This is where I believe you started way off track.
You mean what the Bush Admin did? Are you upset that the "other side" seems to have learned and may be doing the same thing?

I think what is happening here is the radical right who has been so vocal appears to be unable to deal with being the minority, a very small one at that.

Especially when the "leftist" version of "withholding the information" is "posting it on the internet in a form that Rush Limbaugh doesn't know how to search".

:D

A monster-size case of partisanship?