With a Democrat headed for the White House, conservative talk radio should have plenty of real issues to fret over. So why are the Limbaughs and Savages screeching about a phantom threat – the return of the Fairness Doctrine? Democrats such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Dianne Feinstein have expressed some nostalgia for the federal regulation, which from 1949 until 1987 attempted to mandate ideological balance on controversial issues on radio and television stations that use public airways. But “there’s no one in a position of authority pressing to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine,” said Andrew Schwartzman of the Media Access Project. “It is much lower priority than dealing with consolidation of the media, network neutrality . . . and dealing with the digital television transition.” Besides, in today’s multimedia free-for-all, who really believes that a Fairness Doctrine is enforceable, even if it were desirable?
Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan joins the “keep Defense Secretary Robert Gates” crowd: “He is a bipartisan figure of respect – truly an object of across-the-board admiration. He is not part of the old crew that got us into war and bungled it but the new crew that stabilized it and created progress.” But Noonan sounds the alarm on would-be Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “To invite in the Clintons – and it’s always the Clintons, never a Clinton – is to invite in, to summon, drama that will never end. Ever.”
“When King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia stood before the United Nations last week to proclaim his opposition to ‘religious intolerance,’ anyone listening would have to think: Of all the gall!” wrote Joel Brinkley. Yet no one who attended the conference, including President Bush, pointed out the hypocrisy. “Saudi Arabia, it happens, is the world’s most intolerant state on religious matters,” Brinkley noted. “Sure, many other nations are guilty of atrocities committed in the name of religion. We humans have a long and sorry history of that. Today, however, only in Saudi Arabia are these rules institutionalized on such a broad scale – and enforced.”
With a Democrat headed for the White House, conservative talk radio should have plenty of real issues to fret over. So why are the Limbaughs and Savages screeching about a phantom threat – the return of the Fairness Doctrine? Democrats such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Dianne Feinstein have expressed some nostalgia for the federal regulation, which from 1949 until 1987 attempted to mandate ideological balance on controversial issues on radio and television stations that use public airways. But “there’s no one in a position of authority pressing to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine,” said Andrew Schwartzman of the Media Access Project. “It is much lower priority than dealing with consolidation of the media, network neutrality . . . and dealing with the digital television transition.” Besides, in today’s multimedia free-for-all, who really believes that a Fairness Doctrine is enforceable, even if it were desirable?
