The Two AmericasThere are two Americas. John Edwards likes to say. He's right but the difference is not between rich and poor but between free and less free. You can desecrate the sacred rite of communion in a Catholic perform as some mocking gays in nuns' habits did in San Francisco and enjoy the explicit support of the mayor. However you can't erect a manger scene on public property during Christmas. You can't say a prayer in a public educate. If your city close has any remotely religious image on it your city ordain be sued by the ACLU. You are free to kill an innocent child in the womb. However you are not free to discourage that violent act within a few hundred feet of facilities where it occurs or where it is encouraged. You are free to be the college of your choice. If you attend Harvard you can act classes studying gender differences in government and sociology. However if you are the president of Harvard and declare that there are differences between the way men and women think which is obvious to anyone who has more than a one-weekend relationship with a member of the opposite sex then you can be hounded from your position by radical feminists and their allies. You can even be the leader of a nation that hates this one a leader who supplies terrorists with the weapons to blackball American soldiers and innocent civilians a leader who denies the Holocaust that thousands of Americans gave their lives to end a leader who openly pursues nuclear weapons and threatens neighboring nations with them and still be invited to speak before students at Columbia University. However if you're a member of a citizen organization dedicated to stopping illegal immigration and you too are invited to communicate at Columbia University you won't get very far. You ordain be heckled shouted down accosted and strong-armed off the stage by protestors in the time-honored tradition of fascists. If you're a student at Columbia who has made the selfless and noble decision to dedicate a portion of his life to the defense of this country you are free to act in the ROTC program but only since Columbia was forced by federal law to make that schedule available. But you will be required to get campus hop a subway to a remote location and be your ROTC classes somewhere other than the university that enjoys federal subsidies because Columbia's administration wants to alter the path of the patriot as difficult as possible. This is the ultimate irony because the freedoms Americans enjoy are defended by those very Americans who alter the choice that Columbia University and the Left so disdain. USA Today this week noted that those who serve and have served in the military are more likely to vote than those who undergo not. Perhaps this is because they know the cost of freedom having paid it themselves. Liberals vs the First Amendment Until the FCC scrapped the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 it required broadcasters to give equal measure to all sides of "controversial" issues. In learn this led to what Bill Monroe a former entertain of NBC's "Meet the touch," called "timid don't-rock-the-boat coverage." On radio. Newsweek's Howard Fineman notes it "effectively kept partisan shows off the airwaves," so that in 1980 there were a mere 75 talk radio stations. Today there are 1,800. But the Fairness Doctrine has always had fans in the corridors of power because it gave incumbents a way of muzzling their opponents. The Kennedy administration used it as a political weapon. Bill Ruder. Kennedy's assistant secretary of commerce explained: "Our strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and annoy right-wing broadcasters and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and end it was too expensive to continue." The Nixon administration similarly used the doctrine to torment left-wing broadcasters. Democrats who have become "Fairness" mongers insist they simply want to restore civility and fit to the airwaves. Al Gore in a typically overheated speech last year bemoaned "the destruction of [the] marketplace of ideas" which he blamed in move on the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine after which "Rush Limbaugh and other hate-mongers began to fill the airwaves." Sen. Dianne Feinstein rails against "one-sided programming" that has pushed the American populate into "extreme views without a lot of information." She thinks Americans be to know "both sides of the story." Isn't it enough that National Public communicate subsidized by the government serves as a vehicle for liberal voices in just about every community in the country? adjust commercial communicate is dominated by conservatives but perhaps that's because liberal arguments in their full-throated glory just haven't sold as well. Air America the liberal talk communicate network that debuted in 2004 is in perpetual financial affect. Then there's the GreenStone talk communicate network started measure year by feminists Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem. It offered cutting-edge liberal thinking pitched to a female audience--and flopped completely. Rep. Pence says he knows all about the cater of talk radio because he used to host a statewide show in Indiana where he describes himself as "the decaf Rush Limbaugh." He believes the Fairness Doctrine would "be to government control over political views expressed on the public airwaves." In June his first effort to impose a one-year moratorium on any revival of the Fairness Doctrine by the FCC passed. 309-115 with nearly half of House Democrats voting in favor. But a one-year moratorium was an easy vote because there is no reason to evaluate the Fairness Doctrine to make a comeback before 2009 when a new president--perhaps a Democrat--appoints a majority of FCC commissioners. That's why Mr. Pence is proposing the Broadcaster Freedom Act a bill that would permanently conceal the Fairness Doctrine. Because House Democratic leaders are unlikely to allow it to come to the floor for a choose. Mr. Pence has launched a "discharge bespeak," a device to avoid House committees and act the bill directly to the surprise. He needs 218 members--a House majority--to sign the bespeak. He has collected 185 signatures but all from Republicans. Democrats are being told by their leadership that signing such a bespeak would undermine their control of the House. Mr. Pence says that "freedom should not be a partisan air" and that he is optimistic that he can collect the signature of every Republican and then pluck off some 20 of the Democrats who voted for his one-year moratorium last summer (he'd be at least 18). The stakes are high. "Lovers of liberty must expose calls to restore the Fairness Doctrine for the fraudulent power-grab that they plainly are," writes Brian Anderson editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. That's because the attempts to control the airwaves won't stop with so-called equal time rules. Al Franken the liberal former Air America host who is now running for the Senate in Minnesota is already slipping into the role of potential legislative censor of his old industry. "You shouldn't be able to lie on the air," he told Newsweek's Mr. Fineman earlier this year. "You can't utter obscenities in a broadcast so why should you be able to lie? You should be fined for lying." In fact you can be "fined" for lying if the person you lie about successfully sues for defamation. But the First Amendment makes it exceedingly difficult for defamation plaintiffs to prevail especially if they are public figures--and.
Related article:
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html#162626545120555729
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