Wednesday Wingnut Watch
NY’s #1 conservative is also #1 ally of the porn industry. From the politics makes strange bedfellows file…. Reacting to news that among Governor Paterson’s numerous little new taxes, the new 4% tax on downloaded entertainment would apply to downloaded pornography, the head of the New York Conservative Party went, well, a little nuts.
“By taxing it you’re legitimizing it,” said Michael Long, chairman of New York’s Conservative Party. “You’re sending a message to the children, you’re sending a message to the teenagers, if you’re taxing it, how can it be wrong? I don’t know how you can sink much deeper.”
“It’s absolutely outrageous if they’re profiting off of pornography,” Long said. “If they’re raising funds, it’s encouraging the citizens of this state to download it.”
This placed Long squarely in alliance with the other major opponent of the porno tax… the pornographers.
“… the last thing any of us need is an additional tax,” said Steven Hirsch, co-founder and CEO of Vivid Entertainment Group.
And by the way, Mr. Long, you say we encourage an activity by taxing it? Wow, maybe the conservatives really are changing their outlook. Makes one wonder what kind of stimulus package they might’ve developed by themselves. At home. In front of their computers.
A big court case? An opportunity to talk publicly about SEX? This is a job for… Ken Starr. Yes, THAT Ken Starr, who loaded his Whitewater report with loads of prurient details about Bill Clinton’s sex life. Who knows, maybe this time he’ll show videos!
Starr will represent ProtectMarriage.com — the official proponents of Prop 8 — during oral arguments before the court March 5. A constitutional amendment, Prop 8 passed during the November election, overturning a state high court ruling that had legalized “gay marriage.”
The Fair & Balanced Network speaks out against, uh, Fairness and Balance. Sorry, The Bee couldn’t resist that headline, even though I’m not convinced the Fairness Doctrine would represent actual fairness or balance. Actually, for that matter, I don’t even know what the Fairness Doctrine even is, since it was eliminated over 20 years ago and there is no proposal to bring it back.
Oops, before I get carried away with any Fair or Balanced truth-telling, lemme tell you what the wing nuts are saying. Every blog, every talk show, and of course, Fox TV (see below) are agitated at the IDEA that the Fairness Doctrine is coming back…. even though, as near as I can tell, it isn’t Quick history lesson — this was the rule that once required broadcast stations to give air time to opposing points of view when controversial topics were discussed. Common folklore has it that conservative talk radio took hold and thrived because the Fairness Doctrine ended.
In case you missed it when I mentioned it above twice, THERE IS NO PROPOSAL (none that I can find) TO BRING BACK THE FAIRNESS DOCTRINE. However, that doesn’t stop Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and others from sounding the (false?) alarm.
If you come across any great wingnuttery, please send it along so I can share it with our readers in the RT community. sbr@rochesterturning.com
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C’mon now bee, we both know a good number of you listen to Bill Press and it’s pretty common knowledge that he has been advocating this for some time now so it’s hardly a “false alarm” is it? Any of this look familiar from his recent Op Ed in the Washington Post?
“There is no free market in talk radio today, only an exclusive, tightly held, conservative media conspiracy. The few holders of broadcast licenses have made it clear they will not, on their own, serve the general public. Maybe it’s time to bring back the Fairness Doctrine — and bring competition back to talk radio in Washington and elsewhere.”
These folks all seem to think it’s a good idea as well and have gone on the record saying so at various times; Tom Harkin, Debbie Stabenow, Bill Clinton, Louise Slaughter, Dick Durbin, Chuck Schumer, Diane Feinstein….. (how many more would you like?)
In recent weeks both David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs have had the opportunity to put an end to the speculation surrounding the matter as they were each asked specifically about it. Instead, they deferred the question as an issue to be resolved by the FCC.
It’s likely that should some sort of legislation is passed along these lines it will be called something else because of the connotation associated with this term. The end result will be just the same however. I hope you like muzak.
You want some real wing nuttery, here ya go.
Fred Phelps and his tribe will be protesting the memorial service today in Clarence. Must be there were “fags” on the plane.
Really? Thanks. a real nut job to be sure. That this guy has a source of revenue to travel etc - is amazing.
Doing a quick goggle search for news articles on this subject I noticed that many of them issue form FOX news, While it may be true that some like Bill Press (whom I can’t hear anymore) advocate it ’s return, it looks to me like FOX is conducting another McCarthy like scare campaign.
The Fairness Doctrine has been extensively discussed lately–it is not a “non-issue”. If you can stomach him listen to Hannity some night. He’s terrified of it (and rightly so). I’d LOVE for it to return
As for Fred Phelps-I was prepared to be part of a human shield for the funeral a few years back of Sgt Lyons of Brighton. Fortunately Lonsberry (another wingnut) pacified their need for attention by hosting them on-air. They are not just wingnuts–they are dangerous people.
I’m a bit busy to post right now but here is an article from ars technica which has been making the rounds. I really doubt whether the fairness doctrine would be successfully reinstated or that it would be anymore effective than it was in the past– which was basically ineffective.
Is Congress going to introduce a bill calling for the restoration of the Fairness Doctrine? Dark predictions continue to emanate from various experts auguring an attempt to revive it. But according to the Library of Congress’ Thomas guide on Congressional action, the only active Fairness Doctrine-related bills in the House and Senate would bar the FCC from ever bringing the policy back again.
Some lawmaker out there is obviously interested in the Doctrine, though, because the Congressional Research Service has recently published an analysis (PDF) of the regulation’s history and prospects, one that recently showed up on Wikileaks. What does it conclude? Its main findings can’t be encouraging to pro-Fairness Doctrine schemers lurking around the corridors of Capitol Hill.
“Any attempt to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine likely would be met with a constitutional challenge,” the study warns. “Whether a newly instituted Fairness Doctrine would survive constitutional scrutiny remains an open question.” One thing is for sure—wherever you stand on this controversial question, this report is one of the best summaries of the issue available on the Web.
Let’s be reasonable
To recap: the FCC enforced the Fairness Doctrine from 1949 until abandoning it in 1987. It required broadcasters to devote a “reasonable portion” of airtime to “controversial issues of public importance” and to offer access to “the expression of contrasting viewpoints held by responsible elements with respect to the controversial issues presented.”
This mission, despite its theoretical virtues, put the government in charge of regulating the political content of license holders. Broadcasters hated it. The Reagan administration’s FCC bumped the policy off. Congress tried to reinstate the Doctrine twice, but Reagan and the first Bush vetoed their bills.
As the CRS report notes, in February of 2005, a small gaggle of House Democrats took a stab at trying to bring something like the Fairness Doctrine back. Their proposed law got nowhere. Over the next two years they didn’t try again, despite restoring slim majorities in Congress.
If Congressional Democrats were moronic enough to sidetrack themselves in this crisis moment by actually attempting to reintroduce the Fairness Doctrine, and if by some miracle they managed to get such a bill past Republicans, who, despite all their protestations, would probably love to see the Democrats try, would the law survive a legal challenge that reached the United States Supreme Court?
But Republicans had a ball with the controversy, repeatedly submitting bills banning the FCC from reviving the Doctrine. These didn’t get anywhere either. In an effort to calm everybody down, then FCC Chair Kevin Martin publicly promised not to enforce the policy. Neither of the agency’s Democrats objected to this. But the GOP was on a roll. It finally got a rider attached to an appropriations bill preventing Martin or his successors from bringing back Fairness, at least until the budget for fiscal year 2009 is passed or March 6 arrives, whichever comes sooner. That is where we stand now, with, as noted, several bills pending to extend the ban indefinitely.
The CRS reports’ main question can be inflammatorily summarized as follows: if Congressional Democrats were moronic enough to sidetrack themselves in this crisis moment by actually attempting to reintroduce the Fairness Doctrine, and if by some miracle they managed to get such a bill past Republicans, who, despite all their protestations, would probably love to see the Democrats try, would the law survive a legal challenge that reached the United States Supreme Court?
Here’s how the report sees the issue:
Does Red Lion still matter?
As Fairness Doctrine history fanatics know, in 1969 the Supreme Court declared the policy constitutional. In the Red Lion case—a dispute between a radio station and a journalist who demanded his right to respond to an attack—the Supremes ruled that the FCC had statutory authority to implement the doctrine. It also ruled that because of the “scarcity” of broadcast frequencies, the First Amendment right of listeners to hear many viewpoints over the public airwaves outweighed the rights of the license holders themselves.
But by the mid-1980s, the Commission was ready to dump the doctrine. In short, the FCC argued that, with the onset of cable and other technologies, the scarcity concept no longer held the same weight it had two decades earlier. The agency also noted broadcasters who told the Commission that they avoided tackling certain issues for fear of Fairness Doctrine lawsuits.
When an appeals court ruled that Congress had never specifically codified the Fairness Doctrine per se, the FCC made its move—in 1987 it declined to enforce the policy in response to a complaint. “The principal function of the First Amendment has been to protect the free marketplace of ideas by precluding government intrusion,” the Commission declared.
If Congress restored the Fairness Doctrine, a court challenge would doubtless focus on First Amendment questions, the CRS study says. “The Fairness Doctrine is a content-based restriction on speech because it requires a government agent, the FCC, to examine the speech of private actors and to make subjective judgments regarding the fairness of the speech,” it explains. And in Miami Herald Publishing v. Tornillo (1974), the Supreme Court nuked a Florida law that applied the Fairness Doctrine to newspapers.
“It seems, therefore, that if the Supreme Court were to apply strict scrutiny to the Fairness Doctrine the doctrine would be struck down,” the CRS survey concludes. But nota bene that we’re talking about “strict scrutiny” here. The question is whether the Big Nine (or at least five of them) would go for a less strict standing—still finding merit in the scarcity concept. In fact, the high court has repeatedly reaffirmed the ideas that broadcast licenses are scarce or unique—the second most famously in its 1978 Pacifica v. FCC indecency decision.
Tailor me narrow
So it’s possible that the Supremes could opt for “intermediate scrutiny,” the CRS analysis says, based on the following logic:
unlike other regulations on broadcaster speech that have been struck down, the Fairness Doctrine requires that speech be answered with more speech. This aspect of the doctrine has been cited approvingly by the Supreme Court. The Fairness Doctrine does not single out any one point of view as objectionable or off-limits. Instead, it requires that all significant points of view on issues of public importance receive broadcast time. This is a tenet at the core of the First Amendment, and it could be argued that the doctrine achieved its goal of raising the level of debate on the broadcast airwaves, despite the FCC’s findings in the 1980s.
Were the Supreme Court to follow this logic and uphold the Fairness Doctrine yet again, it would probably require the policy to be “narrowly tailored”—that is, enforced on a case-by-case basis, CRS predicts. But other, less flexible systems might also be approved. None of this, however, would apply to satellite and cable providers, who do not hold licenses to the public airwaves and therefore, like newspapers, enjoy strict First Amendment protection.
This is all conjecture, of course. The real legal debate would be launched by some member of the House or Senate submitting a bill calling upon the FCC to start enforcing the Fairness Doctrine again. Is that going to happen? Hopefully not. But one must always be mindful of Einstein’s famous distinction between genius and stupidity. “Genius,” he noted, “has its limits.”
That guy is beyond nuts…I wouldn’t even attach him to the right wing, he’s in some sort of disgusting world of his own.
Actually, the entire family are registered Democrats.
So, I try to be nice to you by separating this wing-nut from the conservatives and you have to link him to the left in return?
I think we can all agree that he’s a horrible person. Let’s leave it at that.
Most of it comes from punitive damages awards from the various civil suits they’ve won as a result of their protests.
Hi Dood, you are correct, plenty of people are TALKING about Fairness Doctrine, but we’re a long way from seeing it happen. In fact, many of those who discuss it will, when elaborating, concede that it is unlikely to ever pass in the Senate. The Bills, Clinton and Press, can talk all they like, and so can the right wing talkers, but that appears to be all it is… talk. Thanks for your provocative comments here every week, I find myself looking forward to it.
The fairness doctrine was meant to address a situation defined by a scarcity of broadcast outlets. The holder of a tv or radio license is granted essentially a monopoly in exchange for supposed public service obligations. There were only 3 networks and not a lot of stations.
IT worked very poorly. Broadcasters would avoid controversial topics rather than address them.
Today the problem isn’t necessarily a scarcity of outlets but the concentration of ownership. Many think it would be better to address this problem directly i.e break up concentrations of ownership in order to bring more minorities and small owners into radio and tv.
“FDR Radio” (Fairness Doctrine Radio)
I like it