Investor’s Business Daily | Jun 27, 2008
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi intends to restore the “Fairness Doctrine” regulating political speech — proof that in the Internet Age, Democrats have lost the communications war.
Forty years ago, Walter Cronkite could declare on the evening news that the Vietnam War was lost, and that’s the way it was. Do Americans want to return to those days by reviving the so-called Fairness Doctrine?
Think of it in terms of consumer choice. You’re on vacation, and you take your family into the $10.95 all-you-can-eat buffet. How would you like it if, when you walk up to fill your plate with lobster and ribs, you find the government has made the restaurant replace those with liver and brussels sprouts?
That’s the approach the Democratic Congress is taking to political speech on the airwaves: You as an American don’t know what’s good for you. If you listen mostly to conservative talk radio, or watch Fox News, then you should be force-fed things you don’t want. (It takes government force because, as the Air America debacle proved, people don’t listen to liberal talk radio.)
Back when the Fairness Doctrine was enforced, radio and TV stations would have to broadcast sleep-inducing lectures by cranky middle-aged ladies, or rants from fringe-group agitators. But today, even the poorest among us can log onto our local public library computer and blog our views to millions.
The most ordinary of Americans this election year have actually used Web cams to appear on national television and ask questions in this year’s presidential debates. There has never been more access to national political discourse. We all enjoy the true fairness of freedom.
Yet Speaker Nancy Pelosi would have Uncle Sam again become speech policeman — because in the free market of mass communication, her party’s message is losing.
Pelosi won’t allow former talk radio host and now Congressman Mike Pence’s legislation permanently banning the Fairness Doctrine to be voted on this year. Why not? “The interest of my caucus is the reverse,” she says.
It obviously is. A discharge petition to bring Pence’s “Broadcaster Freedom Act” to the floor for an up-or-down vote is fewer than 20 signatures away from succeeding. But as of last week not a single House Democrat had signed on.
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I find the whole idea of the “fairness doctrine” incredibly amusing. It’s just pathetic how government programs and legislation just have got to have a deceptive, slick, advertising jingle used in creating a name (or title) for them. First of all, someone like Nancy Pelosi doesn’t care about fairness in how news stories are presented to the public. She just wants the political agenda of her party bosses pushed down the throats of the voting public. In other words, she wants total brainwashing to ensue. That’s her idea of how one runs a “democracy”. The author of that classic novel, 1984, George Orwell stated it best when he wrote (to paraphrase) “whoever controls the media controls the democracy”. This view is proven to be true with what Josef Stalin did and said. Stalin stated (again to paraphrase) “Ideas are more dangerous than guns. We don’t allow our people to have guns, so why should we allow them to have ideas?”
Now, I’ve written about Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat party here. The Republicans want to suppress their opponents ideas just as much as the Democrats do. The true exchange of ideas is dangerous to those who control the government. Believe me, both major political parties do not like the internet, with the facilitation of the exchange of ideas it has given the public. Deceptive information being put on the internet is one tool used to fight the exposing of corruption that the internet provides. Eventually, the public doesn’t know what to believe. (Most people have difficulty using critical thinking.). I think the greatest tool to insure that we have a free society is to train our children to use logic. That is my way of being optimistic.
The reality of many of the DemocRATS is that they are not for freedom, democracy, or the real meaning of the word “fairness.” They are totalitarians and radical leftists at heart who believe in “freedom”, “equality” and “fairness” only as long as they get to decide on the definition of the terms and to whom it applies. Like Orwell said it so eloquently, “all pigs are equal, but some pigs are more equal than others.” That is indeed the mantra of the DemocRATic party. They will say and do anything to rob us of our God-given rights and subjugate an entire country for the sake of power and their corrupted ideology and leftist dogma.
They seem to forget, that just like the French Revolution and Communist Holocausts have shown, once the leftist “utopia” is forced on the people, today’s favored class and priviledged politicians can very quickly become tomorrow’s guillotine customers or Bolshevik/communist firing squad recipients. Once freedom and individual and property rights are left to the whim and fancy of a small group of inidividuals without reference to an eternal God, respect for all human life (see the wholesale embrace of the Left for unrestricted abortions and euthanasia), and specific inalienable God-given rights, anything goes. History is strewn with the catastrophes created by the same mentality and evil inherent in the atheistic/fascist/communist experiments that enslaved, imprisoned, tortured, and killed tens of millions of innocent people across a century of suffering. Have we not learned still?
“Fairness” is used in our society as a way to attack righteousness and virtue. Anything that is right, moral or requires discernment is not “fair”. It is not even “fair” to punish murderers, rapists, and child molestors. It is not even “fair” to accuse anyone of being a molestor anymore even if they are. I mean, what is molestation anyway–its just another form of sexual experssion and it is only the perverted, archaic religious nuts who see it as anything else. You can’t punish people for being who they are. Didn’t God make them that way?
It is only “fair” to prevent folks with such archaic and hurtful ideas from spreading their ideas around.
King Lear destroyed his kingdom and the lives of thousands trying to be “fair”. That is always what happens when “fairness” is applied. Let us remember that God is the least fair of all as the parable of the 11th hour workers reminds us.
Frankly, “fairness” in all its forms is a tool of darkness, destruction and tyranny.