FCC Monitoring Newscasts--Just The Latest Controlling Of The News

Day Of The Living Fairness Doctrine

February 25, 2014 by Ben Crystal 

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The fact that the Federal Communications Commission has retreated from its plan to place monitors in newsrooms across the Nation probably rates a minor celebration. The fact that it even considered trying to place monitors in newsrooms across the country definitely rates major concern. The FCC may have abandoned its Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs (CIN), which it claimed was research into minority media ownership. But CIN had about as much to do with racial identity as National Security Adviser Susan Rice’s Benghazi excuses had to do with the actual events in that godforsaken Libyan hellhole.

According to FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai (the whistle-blower who turned the spotlight on his agency’s plan to make the Nation’s media at least as independent as Pravda was during the Josef Stalin era), CIN represents more than just an incursion into news dissemination by precisely the people who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the process. CIN represents an attempted return to the dark days of the so-called “Fairness Doctrine.”

For those of you who have forgotten the Fairness Doctrine, it lurched into existence in the late 1940s as a Federal attempt to regulate the content of media reportage on politically charged topics. Specifically, it mandated what liberals like to refer to as “equal time” and sane folk refer to as “wasted time.” Under the strictures of the Fairness Doctrine, stations were forced by the government to give as much airtime to opposing viewpoints as they did to any expressed on their share of the airwaves. As an example, under the Fairness Doctrine, any station that aired a report on the rapidly expanding arctic and Antarctic ice sheets would be required to give equal shrift to a “report” crediting the changing weather to pseudoscientific claptrap like so-called “global warming.”

The Fairness Doctrine finally met its ignominious end in the late 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan signed an executive order recognizing that the Bill of Rights absolutely negates leftist attempts at control of the national discourse. But the CIN proves the left never gave up on the dream of an America in which free information exchange is replaced with governmentally homogenized talking points. The fact that CIN met the same end as the Fairness Doctrine in no way mitigates the fact that the Democrats tried to reanimate the Fairness Doctrine’s corpse and send it out for another attack on free speech.

These people are literally trying to do to America what Stalin did to Russia, though they’ve replaced the show trials and gulags with MSNBC and death panels. Ironically, the people who continue to watch MSNBC, support death panels and generally back any and all liberal attempts at government incursions against freedom ought to be among the last to line up behind such tyranny. After all, when Reagan finally drove a stake through the heart of the Fairness Doctrine, they were among the biggest beneficiaries. Were the Fairness Doctrine still law, CNN would be hamstrung by actual ethical standards.  Moreover, were the Fairness Doctrine still law, MSNBC wouldn’t even exist.

Allowing unelected Federal goon squads to stalk media outlets is about as bright a plan as allowing former President, admitted perjurer and sexual predator Bill Clinton to babysit your chubby teenage daughter. Whether one considers the multitrillion-dollar fraud masquerading as Obamacare; the endless array of scandals birthed by Barack Obama and his accomplices through seemingly reflexive mendacity; or even the tendency of Obama surrogates like Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and Attorney General Eric Holder to lie under oath with sociopathic ease, the Obama Era has been defined by dishonesty at a level that makes Clinton’s lackeys look like George Washington.  To be honest, the only people less qualified than liberal bureaucrats to interrupt the informational chain of custody are the people who blindly support liberal bureaucrats.

The real tragicomedy lies in the fact that much like the abominable Fairness Doctrine, the CIN is entirely unnecessary. Despite the endless government attempts to sanitize the information available to the Nation, the truth nearly always finds its way out. For every Fairness Doctrine, there’s a Wikileaks. For every CIN, there’s an Edward Snowden. For every MSNBC, there’s aPersonal Liberty Digest™.  I’ll allow the eloquent Pai to have the final word:

The American people, for their part, disagree about what they want to watch. But everyone should agree on this: The government has no place pressuring media organizations into covering certain stories

FCC Project To Control The News Via In-Station Monitors Is Shelved....For A While.

FCC Backs Away From 1st Amendment-Infringing Plan To ‘Study’ Newsrooms

February 21, 2014 by Ben Bullard 

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Facing massive backlash from the public over its announced plan to place government contractors in the newsrooms of TV stations and print media to “study critical information needs,” the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced it would abandon the idea only one day after the plan was made public.

The FCC billed its “Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs” as a hands-off way to gauge “perceived station bias” and “perceived responsiveness to underserved populations” by placing monitors at news outlets to observe the degree to which news organizations rely on input from the communities they serve.

But the FCC has absolutely zero authority to regulate print media, and it would introduce unConstitutional infringements by extending the scope of its regulatory practices over broadcast services to include government scrutiny of content and content creation.

“No one’s that stupid – we know exactly what they’re trying to do,” said Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren Thursday in an interview with Ajit Pai.

Pai, himself an FCC commissioner, was among the earliest and most vocal critics of the plan. He described its methodology this way:

First, the agency selected eight categories of “critical information” such as the “environment” and “economic opportunities,” that it believes local newscasters should cover. It plans to ask station managers, news directors, journalists, television anchors and on-air reporters to tell the government about their “news philosophy” and how the station ensures that the community gets critical information.

The FCC also wants to wade into office politics. One question for reporters is: “Have you ever suggested coverage of what you consider a story with critical information for your customers that was rejected by management?” Follow-up questions ask for specifics about how editorial discretion is exercised, as well as the reasoning behind the decisions.

The FCC caved today, releasing a statement that tried to control the damage by minimizing the eventual scope of the project and admitting that the study, in its present form at least, reaches too far:

By law, the FCC must report to Congress every three years on the barriers that may prevent  entrepreneurs and small business from competing in the media marketplace, and pursue policies to eliminate those barriers. To fulfill that obligation in a meaningful way, the FCC’s Office of Communications Business Opportunities consulted with academic researchers in 2012 and selected a contractor to design a study which would inform the FCC’s report to Congress. Last summer, the proposed study was put out for public comment and one pilot to test the study design in a single marketplace – Columbia, S.C. – was planned.

However, in the course of FCC review and public comment, concerns were raised that some of the questions may not have been appropriate. Chairman Wheeler agreed that survey questions in the study directed toward media outlet managers, news directors, and reporters overstepped the bounds of what is required. Last week, Chairman Wheeler informed lawmakers that that Commission has no intention of regulating political or other speech of journalists or broadcasters and would be modifying the draft study. Yesterday, the Chairman directed that those questions be removed entirely.

To be clear, media owners and journalists will no longer be asked to participate in the Columbia, S.C. pilot study. The pilot will not be undertaken until a new study design is final. Any subsequent market studies conducted by the FCC, if determined necessary, will not seek participation from or include questions for media owners, news directors or reporters.

Any suggestion that the FCC intends to regulate the speech of news media or plans to put monitors in America’s newsrooms is false. The FCC looks forward to fulfilling its obligation to Congress to report on barriers to entry into the communications marketplace, and is currently revising its proposed study to achieve that goal.