Nancy Pelosi, perennial contender, wins the Unglued Idiot of the Day Award for June 25, 2008, for her support of bringing back the “Fairness Doctrine,” which was dispatched during President Reagan’s administration.
Rep. Mike Pence (R.-Ind.) has written a bill to outlaw the “Fairness Doctrine” - which would require radio station owners to provide equal time to radio commentary when it is requested.
Nancy Pelosi supports the resurrection of the Fairness Doctrine, primarily because conservatives have done such a good job of gaining and holding the interest of radio talk show audiences, and liberals have not. According to Ms. Pelosi, New York Democratic Rep. “Louise Slaughter has been active behind this [revival of the Fairness Doctrine] for a while now.”
I have a theory about why Democrats want to revive the moribund “Fairness Doctrine.” It’s a desperate attempt to save Air America. Air America, with its ultra-liberal lineup of hosts, steadily tanked from its opening, which is terminal and is maintained on life support only by the Liberal practice of throwing good money after bad. Theoretically, if stations broadcasting Air America had to also include conservative shows – Rush, Hannity, etc. – then maybe people would listen, and sponsors would sponsor.
Air America is like the host of failed Liberal schemes of the last century. If a dumb Liberal idea isn’t working, then the problem must be that it was underfunded, and instead of mercifully pulling the plug and allowing “death with dignity,” Liberals throw more money (usually other people’s) at it.
Off the top of my head, examples include: busing to integrate schools (which succeeded in increasing school segregation while wasting scarce education resources); refusing over ten years ago to allow oil drilling offshore and in ANWAR “because we won’t get more oil for ten years” (now it’s ten years later, and we would have more oil, except… and now Democrats are again saying we shouldn’t drill because “because we won’t get more oil for ten years”); unilaterally saving the planet from “global warming” by proposing destruction to the United States economy, while China and India feed their burgeoning economies a steady diet of oil and coal; and proposing to lower gas prices by increasing taxes on oil companies (I know Liberals who think this will work, the same ones that believe you can raise taxes to grow the economy).
Actually, I don’t believe reviving the “Fairness Doctrine” is a Liberal attempt to save Air America; it just gave me another way to kick failed Liberal programs around some more.
I actually believe that all Liberals want to do is kill the popular outlet for conservative thought, talk radio, because they tried to compete with Air America and failed miserably. In accordance with the Liberal doctrine of “if you can’t compete with it, kill it!”, Democrat legislators know that if they require radio stations to carry expensive but unpopular Liberal programs, the radio stations will have to drop the popular conservative shows and go back to brain-dead formats like “all news,” of course provided by the Liberal dominated Main Stream Media.
Now there’s a good idea! Why don’t Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats require all news and entertainment media to provide equal time? What makes radio different from television, magazines, and newspapers? Throwing aside irrelevant technicalities, they are all in the entertainment business.
Why are news readers (the appropriate British title for news anchors) Katie Couric, Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer paid huge salaries? Why is Rush Limbaugh paid more than four prestigious anchors – according to the New York Times, his new contract calls for $400 million through 2016 – combined!?
While the Liberals in my half-vast audience are fuming about Rush’s high valuation, I’ll answer my own question: Rush is paid exorbitant sums because that is his entertainment value. Anyone can read a news article, but only Rush can comment on that article in such a way that he has a huge daily audience eager to hear his take on daily news items. If a radio station carrying his program was forced to run programming every day that in essence said, “we don’t agree with Rush,” that station would lose audience in droves as soon as Rush signed off each day.
Instead of engaging in such programming stupidity, Rush’s stations follow his show with Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and other popular conservative talk show hosts, building on Rush’s popularity instead of fighting to diminish his effect.
Tiger Woods has a similar effect in golf. There are thousands of professional golfers, and I’m sure that Liberals feels each should be given a chance to appear in a tournament. Therefore, if golf was run the way Democrats want to do radio, each tournament would have to have an equal mix of winners and losers.
Until the Democrats spread their influence wider, golf and most other activities will select participants by ability, not some politicians’ idea of “fairness.”
However, that won’t stop the Democrats from trying to “hush Rush.”
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