So lets talk about the "Fairness Doctrine"

You may have heard of late, that the Dems want to reinstitute the "Fairness Doctrine", set aside by President Ford in the 1970s.

Their sole rational is that convservative talk-radio has an unfair influence on the American population, and the liberal/progressive agenda can't get fair airtime.

For the time being, we'll forget that the liberal agenda own ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS television, and we'll just talk about radio, which is all they want to talk about.

Why can't the liberal media get enough a fair amount of airtime on talk-radio? Cause no one's listening. Talk radio is driven by one thing...capitalism. Those advertisers pay for airtime on shows that consumers listen to. And when Air America went on the air...the liberal response to Fox News...it was a bust. Why? No one listened, so no one bought airtime.

So, instead of figuring out why no one listens to their opinion on the radio, they would rather have the government FORCE radio staion owners to give free airtime to offset the conservative talk. So when a fully funded show like Sean Hannity gets three hours of paid airtime, the station owners would then have to give away free airtime to 3 hours of liberal crap. Keeping in mind, no one is listening, so they wont be able to sell ad space even if they tried.

Now let's be real...this doesn't have anything to do with getting equal airtime....it has everything to do with shutting down conservative talk. Lets take a look at what happened the last time the Dems ran everything, and how they used the "Fairness Doctrine".

• Former CBS News President Fred Friendly, in his 1976 book, 'The Good Guys, The Bad Guys and the First Amendment,' Friendly's account was summarized by the CATO Institute's Thomas W. Hazlett and David W. Sosa in their 1997 paper, "Chilling the Internet: Lessons from FCC Regulation of Radio Broadcast," in which they recalled how the Kennedy administration "and the DNC seized upon the Fairness Doctrine as a way to 'counter the radical right' in their battle to pass" the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
• The Citizens Committee for a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which was established and funded by the Democrats, orchestrated a very effective protest campaign against hostile radio editorials, demanding free reply time under the Fairness Doctrine whenever a conservative broadcaster denounced the treaty. Ultimately, the Senate ratified the treaty by far more than the necessary two-thirds majority.
• Flush with success, the DNC and the Kennedy-Johnson administration decided to extend use of the doctrine to other high-priority legislation and the impending 1964 elections. Democratic Party funding sources were used to establish a professional listening post to monitor right-wing radio.
• The DNC also prepared a kit explaining "how to demand time under the Fairness Doctrine," which was handed out at conferences.
• As Bill Ruder, an assistant secretary of commerce under President Kennedy, noted, "Our massive strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters in the hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue."

Why not let the industry run itself? Or, why not figure out why a liberal talk station can't sustain itself? Why not let the masses decide what they want to hear by voting with their dollars? Oh, no, no, no....we can't have the public running around deciding what it wants to hear....the Dems have to tell us what is good for us, what we should listen too, what we should eat, what we should drive....big government remember?

I could help the liberals figure all this out if they wanted to. You know why liberal talk radio doesn't work. Well, in order to absorb information from a talk radio show, it takes time. These shows go on for 2-3 hours..and it takes intelligence to digest the words your hearing into coherent thoughts. Those are the two probelms. Liberals don't have an attention span long enough to follow a story for more than the 90 seconds Katie Couric talks about it, and if they aren't shown pictures....they're lost. That's why they dominate TV, but can't focus long enough to follow a radio show. They're like first graders that can only read "The Big Red House" because it has very few words, and nice big pictures!

If liberals succeed in restoring the Fairness Doctrine, history would likely repeat itself. Instead of the "Citizens Committee for a Nuclear Test Band Treaty," organizations like MoveOn.org and CAIR (who already have a track record of pressuring conservative talk shows) would doubtless demand "free reply time," and the dominance of conservative talk radio, which has been driven by real demand and market forces, would be put into a deep freeze. (last paragraph taken from another author, but I can't find the origianl quote to give him/her credit)