The Fraud of the Fairness Doctrine

Besides the fact that the Fairness Doctrine is all but unenforceable, there are many other flaws with the concept of dictating political fairness to a free media.

First off, the Fairness Doctrine only refers to the obvious and would require an Alan Colmes for every Sean Hannity. But what about less obvious political partisanship? For example, how would the biased agenda setting of a network like CBS be addressed? In this way, the Fairness Doctrine would be superficial at best, allowing more classic forms of political bias to slip under the government radar undetected. Unless the government plans on require hiring practices based on political party affiliation in the news rooms of every television and radio network, this is doomed to failure.

Secondly, how would an individual’s personal politics be determined? There are Conservatives who lean liberal on certain issues and liberals who happen to skew more conservative on some issues.

Those who say that the Fairness Doctrine will bring about a return of “media democracy” are selling you a bill of goods, as a matter of fact, the effects of the fairness doctrine would be quite the opposite. A return to the Fairness Doctrine would take control of program content from the listener, and put it in the hands of a government regulatory commission. Under private ownership, the public determines what the public interest is. That relationship between the public and content can not exist with overburdensom regulations. It’s enough that the FCC combs the airwaves for indecency do we really need them combing for ideology?

Let’s face it, the government can’t even control the blaitant bias of the publically financed PBS and NPR.

For more on The Fairness Doctrine, American Thinker’s Selwyn Duke makes a good case against it:

Of course, many may wonder why I’d take issue with fairness.  Shouldn’t we give the “other side” its day in court, one may ask?  
 

The problem is that this regulation would be applied to talk radio but not arenas dominated by liberal thought, a perfect example of which is the ever-present mainstream media (which presents the “other side”).  This is because talk show hosts trade in red meat commentary, whereas the mainstream press is more subtle in its opinion-making. 
 

Fine then, say the critics, that’s as it should be.  We don’t have to worry about “responsible journalists”; it’s those acid-tongued firebrands who pollute discourse with their pyro-polemics who bedevil us.  And on the surface this sounds convincing, which is why I tell you of the talker and the shill.
 

The dirty little secret behind the Fairness Doctrine is that it punishes the honest.  Think about it: Radio hosts are the talkers; they wear their banners openly as they proclaim who and what they are.  Sure, they may be brash and hyperbolic, loud and oft-sardonic, but there is no pretense, little guile, and you know what they want you to believe.  You know what they’re sellin’ and if you’re buyin’.

Food Network Using Subliminal Advertising?

This kind of thing can usually be chalked up to some kind of control room error but make up your own mind. This is from last weekend’s episode of Iron Chef America:

 

When Danger Reared Its Ugly Head Al Gore Bravely Turned and Fled

Looks like Al Gore has been pulling a Jimmy Carter with his film An Inconvenient Truth. This from The WSJ Opinion Journal:

Al Gore is traveling around the world telling us how we must fundamentally change our civilization due to the threat of global warming. Last week he was in Denmark to disseminate this message. But if we are to embark on the costliest political project ever, maybe we should make sure it rests on solid ground. It should be based on the best facts, not just the convenient ones. This was the background for the biggest Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, to set up an investigative interview with Mr. Gore. And for this, the paper thought it would be obvious to team up with Bjorn Lomborg, author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” who has provided one of the clearest counterpoints to Mr. Gore’s tune.

The interview had been scheduled for months. The day before the interview Mr. Gore’s agent thought Gore-meets-Lomborg would be great. Yet an hour later, he came back to tell us that Bjorn Lomborg should be excluded from the interview because he’s been very critical of Mr. Gore’s message about global warming and has questioned Mr. Gore’s evenhandedness. According to the agent, Mr. Gore only wanted to have questions about his book and documentary, and only asked by a reporter. These conditions were immediately accepted by Jyllands-Posten. Yet an hour later we received an email from the agent saying that the interview was now cancelled. What happened?

It’s pretty clear what happened. Liberals constantly refuse to face their critics out of fear they’ll be called out on their distortions.

A Losing Strategy

 

Even if you think the song is played out, check out this performance of Crazy by Gnarls Barkley from England's Top of the Pops. Absolutely fantastic.

A Must See Vent

Michelle Malkin speaks directly with Iraqi’s who support the goals of freedom and democracy in Iraq in a must see edition of Vent. It’s funny, the MSM has been there for years now and hasn’t been able to find one of these people, Michelle spends a week there and opens up a new perspective the MSM is covering up.

Unfortunately, the faces you see in this video are the same faces we will most likely be abandoning because our politicians lack a backbone, and our people lack a will.

Rep. Eric Cantor

Chief Deputy Whip, Representitive Eric Cantor of Virginia’s 7th district will be joining The Andrew Wilkow Show today(1/18) in the 3rd hour of the show (2pm EST). He will discuss recent legislation he has proposed along with former POW, Representitive Sam Johnson which will keep house Democrats from cutting off funding for American troops in Iraq.

His statement about the proposed legislation:

“The purpose of this legislation is to assure our men and women in Iraq that Congress and America support them.  As a nation, we are debating the future of our involvement in Iraq; this debate is necessary and good.  However, our troops and the dollars that fund them should not be used to play politics during that debate.  Playing politics with our nation’s purse strings will only hurt our troops and encourage the terrorists who want to harm them.

“We must not forget that we are at war with an irreconcilable wing of Islam and it is imperative for the security of the Middle East and America that we succeed against the terrorists.”

France Takes Birth Rate Title

Yesterday, France accepted the award for highest fertility in the EU, tipping the scales at 2.0 children per woman. This from the UK Telegraph:

France’s birth rate is now two babies for every woman, the highest in Europe, the national statistics body said yesterday.

The European average is only 1.5. The birth rate in Britain is 1.8 children per woman of child-bearing age, and hovers around 1.4 in Germany, Italy and Spain. Even fewer women are giving birth in Eastern Europe. However, French women gave birth to 831,000 babies last year, the most in 25 years, according to the national body Insee.

Isn’t that special, the French are just reproducing like rabbits aren’t they. But did they give us the whole story? Should the French be poping the champaign corks or studying their Korans?

This is an excerpt from a piece called The Crescent and the Tricolor published in November 2000 in the Atlantic Monthly:

Islam has left Protestantism and Judaism far behind and is now the second religion of France. No official national statistics are kept on religion and race in France (the country, with its long tradition of equality of citizens before the state, holds such distinctions — officially, at least — to be meaningless), but the best estimates of the country’s Interior Ministry put France’s Muslim population at four million, two million of them French citizens. The historian Alain Besançon has estimated that given the meager rates of churchgoing in France (below five percent), the country now has more Muslims than practicing Catholics. In 1994 Le Monde found that 27 percent of Muslims were believing and practicing — which means that Islam may someday be the country’s predominant religion if one measures by the number of people who practice it. 

But Islam’s weight in France is even greater than that, particularly for the generation to come. For one thing, immigrants and their descendants are concentrated in a few important cities and regions (Paris, Marseille, Rhône-Alpes, Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing). For another, although France’s non-Muslim population has replaced itself at roughly the Western European rate of 1.3 births per woman, immigrants from Islamic countries have been three to four times as fertile for quite some time. The birth rate among Algerian women was 4.4 in 1981 and 3.5 in 1990. That among Moroccans was 5.8 and 3.5 in those years, and among Tunisians 5.1 and 4.2. These numbers do show natality declining toward the national average, but only slowly. Meanwhile, the disparity in birth rates and the concentration of the Muslim population means that in certain French metropolises a new generation of citizens — those born from the 1970s to the 1990s — is one third Muslim.

France has the second highest percentage of Muslims in the entire EU (second only to tiny Bulgaria, who’s birth rate suffers from the Eastern European slump and only joined the EU on January 1st of this year), it makes perfect sense that their birth rate would surpass that of countries with smaller Muslim populations.

Paging doctor Steyn, doctor Mark Steyn…you’re needed at the maternity ward of Broussais Hospital in Paris.

Olbermann Calls Foxs’ 24 “Propaganda”

Keith Olbermann attacked Foxs’ 24 as a “a program length commercial for one political party.” A somewhat realistic portrayal of a massive terror attack on on the US is automatically propaganda? What if Fox had made a movie which showed 19 hijackers flying 4 planes into targets all over the northeast before 9/11? Would that have been dismissed as propaganda and fear mongering Keith?

If Keith Olbermann is the sickness… Hugh Hewitt is the cure. This from todays opinion piece on ABC news:

 Given that there are easily, oh, 10 million people in the world who would stand up and cheer at the real version of Monday night’s fictionalized attack, and at least a few tens of thousands trying hard to do a deed of at least proportionate scale given the weaponry available, it is silly to argue that “it” couldn’t possibly happen. Of course it could happen. Eventually another nuke will go off, and it is not likely to be the obvious action of a state actor. So what is the “too far” in the question supposed to mean? It can only be that “24″ is engaged in fear-mongering, and that is as stupid a charge as can be made.

Would the BBC have been going “too far” if in 1937 it had broadcast a radio drama depicting life in a Hitler-authorized death camp where hundreds of thousands of Jews were being executed in gas chambers, one of a string of such camps springing up across Europe?

Would a Paris newspaper have been going “too far” if it had run a short story in 1913 supposing trench warfare that would claim millions of casualties?

 Had PBS run a drama proposing a Communist massacre of millions of Cambodians in 1973 or a Rawandan genocide of more than a half million Tutsis twenty years later, would those prophecies have been going “too far?”

 I can’t believe I missed this point. Newsbusters has some quotes:

Olbermann recounted how 24 “featured a mall attack, a would-be suicide bomber on a subway, and a successful suicide bombing on a passenger bus. Not in places where these things have already happened, but in a country called the United States of America. In case you missed the point, the show finished up with a nuclear weapon detonating in a major American city, literally conjuring up the administration’s imagery for the war in Iraq, the good old mushroom cloud.”

Am I reading this properly? Did Olby just claim that there havn’t been any successful suicide bombings in The United States of America? That mall attacks havn’t been thwarted? That subway attacks havn’t been planned? I think it’s becoming more and more clear every day that ole’ Olby lives in fantasy land.

Oops! British Newscaster Makes An Arse of Herself

Meet Anglia News’ Emma Baker. She’s having a bad day. This from metro.co.uk:

At one point, Miss Baker, 26, said to an unseen male colleague: ‘Have you phoned your wife this morning or have you phoned Jan?’

Then, to an unseen female colleague, she said: ‘Good morning, Mrs Shameless.’ Viewer Sally Fox, 45, from Milton Keynes, said: ‘It was much more interesting than the usual local news.

It was like a soap opera.

‘When she put her hand up her shirt it seemed she was fiddling with her bra. I saw her tummy.

‘Then, when she said about the guy phoning his wife, it seemed she was suggesting someone was having an affair. I was thinking: “Whatever is going on?”.

This all went on for about three-and-a-half minutes. She was preening herself and pouting like Madonna, sticking out her boobs.

‘Then somebody obviously told her this was going out live and her face went ashen.

Who says British comedy sucks? Apparently the “or have you phoned Jen” comment to her off air colleague was an allusion to an affair he’s having. 

I’ll have the video of this just as soon as it becomes available.