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We are less than a week from the Big Day. It is probable that Barack Obama will be our next president and he will be welcomed by a liberal-controlled House and Senate. Although I haven’t made peace with the fact that Obama may win, and I’m certainly not happy about it, I have accepted it.
What concerns me at this point are some of the peripheral issues we aren’t hearing about in the mainstream media. Specifically, freedom of speech and the Fairness Doctrine.
The Fairness Doctrine has a long history, dating back to the 1920s. It became mainstream in the 1940s and was eventually abandoned in 1987.
In Killing Talk Radio, Brian C. Anderson and Adam D. Thierer provide a look at the history of the Fairness Doctrine. It’s extremely interesting reading. These paragraphs are an example of the enlightening information I found there:
The civil libertarian Nat Hentoff remembers what it was like to be a broadcaster in the old days. “I was in radio under the reign of the Fairness Doctrine, at WMEX in Boston in the 1940s and early Fifties,” he recalls in a talk at Hillsdale College, noting that he would occasionally offer political opinions on air, including on his music programs. “Suddenly Fairness Doctrine letters started coming in from the FCC and our station’s front office panicked. Lawyers had to be summoned; tapes of accused broadcasters had to be examined with extreme care; voluminous responses had to be prepared and sent. After a few of these FCC letters, our boss announced that there would be no more controversy of any sort on WMEX. We had been muzzled.”
In the 1960s Bill Rudner, the Democratic Party official said:
“Our massive strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass the right-wing broadcasters, and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too costly to continue.” The party activist Martin Firestone elaborated on the strategy in a confidential 1964 report to the Democratic National Committee, describing the 1,035 letters that the campaign wrote to conservative stations, generating 1,678 hours of free time. The stations, mostly rural, were small and cash-starved, so they proved easy to browbeat. “Were our efforts to be continued on a year-round basis, we would find that many of these stations would consider the broadcasts of these programs bothersome and burdensome … and would start dropping the programs from their broadcast schedule,” Firestone wrote. A DNC staffer added: “Even more important than the free radio time was the effectiveness of this operation in inhibiting the political activity of these right-wing broadcasts.”
In 1987 the Fairness Doctrine was abandoned and it was clear that, rather than encourage more exchange of ideas, it had a so-called “chilling effect”.
That the doctrine chilled free speech became indisputable in the immediate aftermath of its demise. As a 1997 study by Hazlett and David Sosa charted, AM radio, freed from its shackles, suddenly exploded with news programming and political talk shows. Such “informational” broadcasts expanded from 7 percent of all AM programming to 28 percent just eight years after the Fairness Doctrine’s end; on FM, the increase was from 3 percent to 7 percent. The tube soon featured lots more news coverage and opinion, too. Today, around 1,500 radio stations feature a talk or news format—and the vast majority broadcast conservative, libertarian, or populist voices, as listeners look for an alternative to a liberal mainstream press.
The unfortunate truth right now is that Obama is using tactics that point to a possible reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine. Any television or radio station airing what is considered by the Obama campaign to be unflattering views toward Obama or his policies is quickly silenced. Obama’s camp encourages his supporters to call or e-mail these stations via the Obama Action Wire. The page even tells the supporters what to say.
Barack Obama and the Suppression of Dissent by Marianne at Conservative Amazons provides an excerpt from a letter from Obama’s campaign to supporters smearing David Freddoso and encouraging them to tell WGN the interview is “lowering the standards of political discourse.”
Let this be a lesson to youby Carolyn Hileman at The Voice discusses how Joe the Plumber was treated after he was thrust into the spotlight with a simple question.
Smearing Joe the Plumber by John at Power Line elaborates on the methods used to try and discredit Joe.
Joe Biden is getting in on the act too. WFTV in Florida did an interview
