So you’d be fine with broadcast TV networks having to make sure they have political balance by putting an equal number of conservatives on the air?
Or he’d join Howard Stern on satellite radio.
:dubious: Oh, come on!
Where else do they dominate?
Newspapers are almost all conservative. The liberal press line should be put to bed ,it is bogus. When Bernstein and Woodward were writing about Watergate they were under huge pressure. Our system since then has become more responsive to money and power. The Iraq war was pushed by nearly every single paper in the nation. TV channels fell immediately in lockstep. Now that the media is owned by conglomerates, there will be less and less room for dissenting opinion. Stories of corporate malfeasance are buried . To find out whats going on requires the internets. They will come for that soon enough.
The fairness doctrine is logical. The airwaves are owned by the people. Licensing is done by the FCC who are supposed to work for us. Guess who owns the FCC.
We need it now more than ever.
Equal to what? I sure don’t see many liberals on TV. I’d be all for balance, if it could be defined.
I suppose we could define it in terms of representing the viewpoints that Americans hold. Did you know that more Americans, by a significant margin, favor the impeachment and removal from office of President Bush than were for a similar fate for Clinton in, say, August through October of 1998? Then consider the way the media played those debates. Right now, you’d hardly know anyone but a few fringe nuts wanted Bush impeached. Back then, the media’s reporting rarely mentioned that only a relatively small percentage of Americans felt Clinton deserved impeachment.
What I do remember is that some librul outfits sought to advertise on Rush’s show in an effort to find a forum to rebut him - and were told their money wasn’t any good.
No, not really.
Well, you’ve been up to your armpits in this debate…
Because most of the public still gets most of its news and commentary from traditional ‘push’ media, and the broadcast media still provide a big chunk of that.
Maybe in 20 years it would cease to matter, but it would sure as shootin’ matter now.
Fox. CNN. The editorial pages of all major newspapers, including “liberal” ones. Less obviously, the news sections of such papers (where conservative bias is expressed less in what is said than in what is ignored.) Just about everywhere but specialized left-wing outlets like The Nation and Democracy Now!
Okay, here’s where I get confused. As much as I disagree with the “liberal media” meme, I do have to say that my experience makes me agree with conservatives on one thing: the war in Iraq is consistently portrayed in a highly negative fashion. You could argue that there IS no good news coming out of Iraq, EVER, but not only do I find that slightly unbelievable, it still makes me ask this: if the Iraq war is thought of so highly in conservative circles, and the media is so conservative, why isn’t there a MUCH bigger push to show the “good news” of Iraq, no matter how far they have to dig to get it?
PS: Is Project Censored really the best cite to give, considering the (somewhat deserved, IMO) shellacking they got from all sides on this very board when they published their “most censored” list of the year?)
For one thing, “conservatives” are no longer of one mind about the war. Even among them, it is highly unpopular in many sectors. The influence of the corporate interests – and, of course, the Administration itself – is probably the only reason you ever hear anything but bad news about it.
They publish that list every year. To which are you referring?
But isn’t the conservative divide over the war relatively recent? I remember hearing nothing but bad news about it from the start.
Also, that last sentence isn’t parsing for me. It looks like you’re saying that corporate and Administration influences are causing BAD news.
The most recent one. Can’t seem to find the damn thread, though. Maybe I was thinking of Slashdot or something.
Every story on NPR has a counterpaint. If it presents Shields it presents Brooks. They always have an equal and opposite on. You are so slanted you can not see what fair journalism actually is.
You must not have been watching Fox. But even in other outlets, there was always a note of optimism – at least, at first.
WRT Iraq, yes, they are causing bad news – but they are also causing the reporting of good news.
Well, here’s the Top 25 of 2006. Make what you will of it.
I remember the initial airstrike where Saddam was erroneously thought killed and the weeks after–it was my impression that there was nothing but wall-to-wall coverage of conservatives crowing “See, I told you so” and the talking heads nodding their heads in lockstep.
Took quite some time before the second guessing took effect as the situation deteriorated to the point where it was just too hard to gloss over.
YMMV.
The issue, to me. seems to be that the libs hate conservative talk radio. They are not content to have the newspapers and the TV networks tilt their way, they gotta have it all. So they tried the free market concept, with predictable results. When Air America went belly-up because nobody listened to it, they could only come up with the idea of forcing talk radio out of business with this so-called Fairness Doctrine.
Actually, there is a possibility that it actually might work out for the better in the long run. If it does come into play, the talk radio hosts will simply invite in a liberal guest, then spend the show showing them up as fools, just like they do now in the rare times that they can get a lib to come on their show.
I don’t understand how it could be adjudicated whether or not a station is doing right by the Fairness doctrine.
How many of the myriad points of view must it air? How is it to decide which ones to air and which not? How to determine whether it’s airing all points of view “honestly?” “Fairly?” What does any of this mean?
-FrL-
Yep, that’s what I was thinking.
In the past, I think the doctrine was only applied to making sure you gave equal time to the various politicians in a given race. That’s not to difficult, but still presents problems for the less popular pols. But if you’re just pontificating about issues in general, who’s to decide what the “conservative” position is and what the “liberal” position is, not to mention that their might be any number of other positions that don’t fit into that dichotomy. Do the Libertarians and the Greens get equal time? If I have Rush Limbaugh talking about how we need to give the president more power to detain “unlawful combatants”, can we have a Libertarian on to argue with him, or does it have to be a Democrat?
I can’t see this as anything other than purely a political move. There is no way the Democrats would be backing this if talk radio was a haven for progressives. And if it were, we’d almost certainly see the Republicans arguing for more “balance”.
You mean having an album that debuts at #1 in 2006 after the “unflattering” statements and has cracked over $10 million in earnings per year since then is what you call suffering?
Yehyehyehyehyehyehyehyehyeh!!!
But, they don’t.
Air America is still broadcasting, actually.
And be on the lookout for Independent World Television!
It was a rhetorical question. You and I both know that this will come down to Republicans and Democrats, and the others might be thrown a bone or two.
If there is a problem (and I’m not convinced there is), a better solution is to disallow large holdings in a given medium, opening that medium up to more owners and then letting the chips fall where they may. Free speech is such a fundamental necessity in a democracy that I don’t want the government anywhere near where they can start picking and choosing what speech is need to “balance” what other speech.