In the increasingly infinitesimal chance that the Democrats actually do win a majority in the House of Representatives this November I would hope that one thing that wouldn't fall of the radar would be a statutory reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine. Nothing is hurting the progressive movement more than the complete dominance of our public airwaves by the right wing message machine.
There is perhaps no other issue that so clearly defines the cognitive dissonance necessary to call oneself a conservative these days than the faith-based belief that the Fairness Doctrine would "hush Rush" and other right wing voices on the airwaves while arguing simultaneously that the airwaves and the "MSM" are predominantly liberal with conservative voices being squelched. Look; progressives either dominate the discourse or they don't. You can't have it both ways.
Of course the political Right also tries to conflate the issue by arguing that print media, which isn't covered by the Fairness Doctrine, is overwhelmingly liberal. Putting aside the fact that this view is almost entirely predicated on some rather dubious studies of the voting patterns of print journalists, this argument misses the central point to the Fairness Doctrine itself; that the public airwaves which we own collectively and license to the broadcast companies should reflect the views of ALL Americans not just corporations.
The conservative position on the Fairness Doctrine makes in clear they really don't believe for a second that the media is dominated by liberals but simply want to continue to use that meme as a kind of shorthand to try and demonstrate their victimization. If they truly believed that the left controlled the discourse in this country they'd reinstate the Fairness Doctrine in a second.
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4 comments:
I have a fairly simple proposal. We can do away with the Fairness Doctrine only if we can also do away with regulating the airwaves at all. That means all frequencies are completely open to use by all people just like citizen's band is now.
Whoever opposes my proposal either wants the Fairness Doctrine or they are lying about the importance of regulating the media. In other words, opponents of my proposal want to regulate their political opponents off the air. That sort of excessive regulation doesn't sound very conservative or Republican to me.
I like that.
Take something to it's logical extreme to point out it's fallacy.
I don't know how these boobs live with their own intellectual inconsistency. It'd drive me INSANE to hold to completely contradictory positions at the same time.
It's Doublethink. That wacky Orwell! What a goofball!
I liked what you wrote, I didn't understand how the image and caption connect to it though. What's the deelio-yo?
I guess you could interpret it a bunch of ways but if you think of the water in the picture as the Fairness Doctrine and the witch as conservative blathering about a media they say is prejudiced against them you'd probably get what I was trying to get across.
There's three ways I do this picture/ quote thingy. The first is to read or see something and immediately have a scene from a movie pop into my head that I could use.
The second is to have a great movie quote and find a political thing that matches it to write about. That's obviously not as efficient.
The third thing that I did in this case is to write something and search around for a movie quote to match. That is actually the toughest way to do it, believe it or not.
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