Origin of the Fairness Doctrine

[sirs]

Apologies up front, for the length of this piece.  Very interesting for those that wish to read it at length

Divided We Stand
Can a polarized nation win a protracted war?

BY JAMES Q. WILSON
Wednesday, February 15, 2006  

The 2004 election left our country deeply divided over whether our country is deeply divided. For some, America is indeed a polarized nation, perhaps more so today than at any time in living memory. In this view, yesterday's split over Bill Clinton has given way to today's even more acrimonious split between Americans who detest George Bush and Americans who detest John Kerry, and similar divisions will persist as long as angry liberals and angry conservatives continue to confront each other across the political abyss. Others, however, believe that most Americans are moderate centrists, who, although disagreeing over partisan issues in 2004, harbor no deep ideological hostility. I take the former view.

By polarization I do not have in mind partisan disagreements alone. These have always been with us. Since popular voting began in the 19th century, scarcely any winning candidate has received more than 60% of the vote, and very few losers have received less than 40%. Inevitably, Americans will differ over who should be in the White House. But this does not necessarily mean they are polarized.

By polarization I mean something else: an intense commitment to a candidate, a culture, or an ideology that sets people in one group definitively apart from people in another, rival group. Such a condition is revealed when a candidate for public office is regarded by a competitor and his supporters not simply as wrong but as corrupt or wicked; when one way of thinking about the world is assumed to be morally superior to any other way; when one set of political beliefs is considered to be entirely correct and a rival set wholly wrong. In extreme form, as defined by Richard Hofstadter in "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (1965), polarization can entail the belief that the other side is in thrall to a secret conspiracy that is using devious means to obtain control over society. Today's versions might go like this: "Liberals employ their dominance of the media, the universities, and Hollywood to enforce a radically secular agenda"; or, "conservatives, working through the religious Right and the big corporations, conspired with their hired neocon advisers to invade Iraq for the sake of oil."

Polarization is not new to this country. It is hard to imagine a society more divided than ours was in 1800, when pro-British, pro-commerce New Englanders supported John Adams for the presidency while pro-French, pro-agriculture Southerners backed Thomas Jefferson. One sign of this hostility was the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798; another was that in 1800, just as in 2000, an extremely close election was settled by a struggle in one state (New York in 1800, Florida in 2000).

The fierce contest between Abraham Lincoln and George McClellan in 1864 signaled another national division, this one over the conduct of the Civil War. But thereafter, until recently, the nation ceased to be polarized in that sense. Even in the half-century from 1948 to (roughly) 1996, marked as it was by sometimes strong expressions of feeling over whether the presidency should go to Harry Truman or Thomas Dewey, to Dwight Eisenhower or Adlai Stevenson, to John F. Kennedy or Richard Nixon, to Nixon or Hubert Humphrey, and so forth, opinion surveys do not indicate widespread detestation of one candidate or the other, or of the people who supported him.

Now they do. Today, many Americans and much of the press regularly speak of the president as a dimwit, a charlatan, or a knave. A former Democratic presidential candidate has asserted that Mr. Bush "betrayed" America by launching a war designed to benefit his friends and corporate backers. A senior Democratic senator has characterized administration policy as a series of "lies, lies, and more lies" and has accused Mr. Bush of plotting a "mindless, needless, senseless, and reckless" war. From the other direction, similar expressions of popular disdain have been directed at Sen. John Kerry (and before him at President Bill Clinton); if you have not heard them, that may be because (unlike many of my relatives) you do not live in Arkansas or Texas or other locales where the New York Times is not read. In these places, Mr. Kerry is widely spoken of as a scoundrel.

In the 2004 presidential election, over two-thirds of Kerry voters said they were motivated explicitly by the desire to defeat Mr. Bush. By early 2005, President Bush's approval rating, which stood at 94% among Republicans, was only 18% among Democrats--the largest such gap in the history of the Gallup poll. These data, moreover, were said to reflect a mutual revulsion between whole geographical sections of the country, the so-called Red (Republican) states versus the so-called Blue (Democratic) states. As summed up by the distinguished social scientist who writes humor columns under the name of Dave Barry, residents of Red states are "ignorant racist fascist knuckle-dragging Nascar-obsessed cousin-marrying road-kill-eating tobacco-juice-dribbling gun-fondling religious fanatic rednecks," while Blue-state residents are "godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving leftwing Communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts."

To be sure, other scholars differ with Dr. Barry. To them, polarization, although a real enough phenomenon, is almost entirely confined to a small number of political elites and members of Congress. "In Culture War?" (2004), which bears the subtitle "The Myth of a Polarized America," Morris Fiorina of Stanford argues that policy differences between voters in Red and Blue states are really quite small, and that most are in general agreement even on issues like abortion and homosexuality.

But the extent of polarization cannot properly be measured by the voting results in Red and Blue states. Many of these states are in fact deeply divided internally between liberal and conservative areas, and gave the nod to one candidate or the other by only a narrow margin. Inferring the views of individual citizens from the gross results of presidential balloting is a questionable procedure.

Nor does Mr. Fiorina's analysis capture the very real and very deep division over an issue like abortion. Between 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided, and now, he writes, there has been no change in the degree to which people will or will not accept any one of six reasons to justify an abortion: (1) the woman's health is endangered; (2) she became pregnant because of a rape; (3) there is a strong chance of a fetal defect; (4) the family has a low income; (5) the woman is not married; (6) and the woman simply wants no more children. Mr. Fiorina may be right about that. Nevertheless, only about 40% of all Americans will support abortion for any of the last three reasons in his series, while over 80% will support it for one or another of the first three.

In other words, almost all Americans are for abortion in the case of maternal emergency, but fewer than half if it is simply a matter of the mother's preference. That split--a profoundly important one--has remained in place for over three decades, and it affects how people vote. In 2000 and again in 2004, 70% of those who thought abortion should always be legal voted for Al Gore or John Kerry, while over 70% of those who thought it should always be illegal voted for George Bush.

Division is just as great over other high-profile issues. Polarization over the war in Iraq, for example, is more pronounced than any war-related controversy in at least a half-century. In the fall of 2005, according to Gallup, 81% of Democrats but only 20% of Republicans thought the war in Iraq was a mistake. During the Vietnam war, by contrast, itself a famously contentious cause, there was more unanimity across party lines, whether for or against: in late 1968 and early 1969, about equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans thought the intervention there was a mistake. Pretty much the same was true of Korea: in early 1951, 44% of Democrats and 61% of Republicans thought the war was a mistake--a partisan split, but nowhere near as large as the one over our present campaign in Iraq.

Polarization, then, is real. But what explains its growth? And has it spread beyond the political elites to influence the opinions and attitudes of ordinary Americans?

The answer to the first question, I suspect, can be found in the changing politics of Congress, the new competitiveness of the mass media, and the rise of new interest groups.

That Congress is polarized seems beyond question. When, in 1998, the House deliberated whether to impeach President Clinton, all but four Republican members voted for at least one of the impeachment articles, while only five Democrats voted for even one. In the Senate, 91% of Republicans voted to convict on at least one article; every single Democrat voted for acquittal.

The impeachment issue was not an isolated case. In 1993, President Clinton's budget passed both the House and the Senate without a single Republican vote in favor. The same deep partisan split occurred over taxes and supplemental appropriations. Nor was this a blip: since 1950, there has been a steady increase in the percentage of votes in Congress pitting most Democrats against most Republicans.

In the midst of the struggle to pacify Iraq, Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said the war could not be won and Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the House Democrats, endorsed the view that American forces should be brought home as soon as possible. By contrast, although there was congressional grumbling (mostly by Republicans) about Korea and complaints (mostly by Democrats) about Vietnam, and although Sen. George Aiken of Vermont famously proposed that we declare victory and withdraw, I cannot remember party leaders calling for unconditional surrender.

The reasons for the widening fissures in Congress are not far to seek. Each of the political parties was once a coalition of dissimilar forces: liberal Northern Democrats and conservative Southern Democrats, liberal coastal Republicans and conservative Midwestern Republicans. No longer; the realignments of the South (now overwhelmingly Republican) and of New England (now strongly Democratic) have all but eliminated legislators who deviate from the party's leadership. Conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans are endangered species now approaching extinction. At the same time, the ideological gap between the parties is growing: if there was once a large overlap between Democrats and Republicans--remember "Tweedledum and Tweedledee"?--today that congruence has almost disappeared. By the late 1990s, virtually every Democrat was more liberal than virtually every Republican.

The result has been not only intense partisanship but a sharp rise in congressional incivility. In 1995, a Republican-controlled Senate passed a budget that President Clinton proceeded to veto; in the loggerhead that followed, many federal agencies shut down (in a move that backfired on the Republicans). Congressional debates have seen an increase not only in heated exchanges but in the number of times a representative's words are either ruled out of order or "taken down" (that is, written by the clerk and then read aloud, with the offending member being asked if he or she wishes to withdraw them).

It has been suggested that congressional polarization is exacerbated by new districting arrangements that make each House seat safe for either a Democratic or a Republican incumbent. If only these seats were truly competitive, it is said, more centrist legislators would be elected. That seems plausible, but David C. King of Harvard has shown that it is wrong: in the House, the more competitive the district, the more extreme the views of the winner. This odd finding is apparently the consequence of a nomination process dominated by party activists. In primary races, where turnout is low (and seems to be getting lower), the ideologically motivated tend to exercise a preponderance of influence.

All this suggests a situation very unlike the half-century before the 1990s, if perhaps closer to certain periods in the 18th and 19th centuries. Then, too, incivility was common in Congress, with members not only passing the most scandalous remarks about each other but on occasion striking their rivals with canes or fists. Such partisan feeling ran highest when Congress was deeply divided over slavery before the Civil War and over Reconstruction after it. Today the issues are different, but the emotions are not dissimilar.

Next, the mass media. Not only are they themselves increasingly polarized, but consumers are well aware of it and act on that awareness. Fewer people now subscribe to newspapers or watch the network evening news. Although some of this decline may be explained by a preference for entertainment over news, some undoubtedly reflects the growing conviction that the mainstream press generally does not tell the truth, or at least not the whole truth.

In part, media bias feeds into, and off, an increase in business competition. In the 1950s, television news amounted to a brief 30-minute interlude in the day's programming, and not a very profitable one at that; for the rest of the time, the three networks supplied us with westerns and situation comedies. Today, television news is a vast, growing, and very profitable venture by the many broadcast and cable outlets that supply news twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

The news we get is not only more omnipresent, it is also more competitive and hence often more adversarial. When there were only three television networks, and radio stations were forbidden by the fairness doctrine from broadcasting controversial views, the media gravitated toward the middle of the ideological spectrum, where the large markets could be found. But now that technology has created cable news and the Internet, and now that the fairness doctrine has by and large been repealed, many media outlets find their markets at the ideological extremes.

Here is where the sharper antagonism among political leaders and their advisers and associates comes in. As one journalist has remarked about the change in his profession, "We don't deal in facts [any longer], but in attributed opinions." Or, these days, in unattributed opinions. And those opinions are more intensely rivalrous than was once the case.

The result is that, through commercial as well as ideological self-interest, the media contribute heavily to polarization. Broadcasters are eager for stories to fill their round-the-clock schedules, and at the same time reluctant to trust the government as a source for those stories. Many media outlets are clearly liberal in their orientation; with the arrival of Fox News and the growth of talk radio, many are now just as clearly conservative.

The evidence of liberal bias in the mainstream media is very strong. The Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) has been systematically studying television broadcasts for a quarter-century. In the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry received more favorable mentions than any presidential candidate in CMPA's history, especially during the month before election day. This is not new: since 1980 (and setting aside the recent advent of Fox News), the Democratic candidate has received more favorable mentions than the Republican candidate in every race except the 1988 contest between Michael Dukakis and George H. W. Bush. A similarly clear orientation characterizes weekly newsmagazines like Time and Newsweek.

For its part, talk radio is listened to by about one-sixth of the adult public, and that one-sixth is made up mostly of conservatives. National Public Radio has an audience of about the same size; it is disproportionately liberal. The same breakdown affects cable-television news, where the rivalry is between CNN (and MSNBC) and Fox News. Those who watch CNN are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans; the reverse is emphatically true of Fox. As for news and opinion on the Internet, which has become an important source for college graduates in particular, it, too, is largely polarized along political and ideological lines, emphasized even more by the culture that has grown up around news blogs.

At one time, our culture was only weakly affected by the media because news organizations had only a few points of access to us and were largely moderate and audience-maximizing enterprises. Today the media have many lines of access, and reflect both the maximization of controversy and the cultivation of niche markets. Once the media talked to us; now they shout at us.

And then there are the interest groups. In the past, the major ones--the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, and labor organizations like the AFL-CIO--were concerned with their own material interests. They are still active, but the loudest messages today come from very different sources and have a very different cast to them. They are issued by groups concerned with social and cultural matters like civil rights, managing the environment, alternatives to the public schools, the role of women, access to firearms, and so forth, and they directly influence the way people view politics.

Interest groups preoccupied with material concerns can readily find ways to arrive at compromise solutions to their differences; interest groups divided by issues of rights or morality find compromise very difficult. The positions taken by many of these groups and their supporters, often operating within the two political parties, profoundly affect the selection of candidates for office. In brief, it is hard to imagine someone opposed to abortion receiving the Democratic nomination for president, or someone in favor of it receiving the Republican nomination.

Outside the realm of party politics, interest groups also file briefs in important court cases and can benefit from decisions that in turn help shape the political debate. Abortion became a hot controversy in the 1970s not because the American people were already polarized on the matter but because their (mainly centrist) views were not consulted; instead, national policy was determined by the Supreme Court in a decision, Roe v. Wade, that itself reflected a definition of "rights" vigorously promoted by certain well-defined interest groups.

Polarization not only is real and has increased, but it has also spread to rank-and-file voters through elite influence.

In "The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion" (1992), John R. Zaller of UCLA listed a number of contemporary issues--homosexuality, a nuclear freeze, the war in Vietnam, busing for school integration, the 1990-91 war to expel Iraq from Kuwait--and measured the views held about them by politically aware citizens. (By "politically aware," Zaller meant people who did well answering neutral factual questions about politics.) His findings were illuminating.

Take the Persian Gulf war. Iraq had invaded Kuwait in August 1990. From that point through the congressional elections in November 1990, scarcely any elite voices were raised to warn against anything the United States might contemplate doing in response. Two days after the mid-term elections, however, President George H. W. Bush announced that he was sending many more troops to the Persian Gulf. This provoked strong criticism from some members of Congress, especially Democrats.

As it happens, a major public-opinion survey was under way just as these events were unfolding. Before criticism began to be voiced in Congress, both registered Democrats and registered Republicans had supported Mr. Bush's vaguely announced intention of coming to the aid of Kuwait; the more politically aware they were, the greater their support. After the onset of elite criticism, the support of Republican voters went up, but Democratic support flattened out. As Mr. Bush became more vigorous in enunciating his aims, politically aware voters began to differ sharply, with Democratic support declining and Republican support increasing further.

Much the same pattern can be seen in popular attitudes toward the other issues studied by Mr. Zaller. As political awareness increases, attitudes split apart, with, for example, highly aware liberals favoring busing and job guarantees and opposing the war in Vietnam, and highly aware conservatives opposing busing and job guarantees and supporting the war in Vietnam.

But why should this be surprising? To imagine that extremist politics has been confined to the chattering classes is to believe that Congress, the media, and American interest groups operate in an ideological vacuum. I find that assumption implausible.

As for the extent to which these extremist views have spread, that is probably best assessed by looking not at specific issues but at enduring political values and party preferences. In 2004, only 12% of Democrats approved of George Bush; at earlier periods, by contrast, three to four times as many Democrats approved of Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Over the course of about two decades, in other words, party affiliation had come to exercise a critical influence over what people thought about a sitting president.

The same change can be seen in the public's view of military power. Since the late 1980s, Republicans have been more willing than Democrats to say that "the best way to ensure peace is through military strength." By the late 1990s and on into 2003, well over two-thirds of all Republicans agreed with this view, but far fewer than half of all Democrats did. In 2005, three-fourths of all Democrats but fewer than a third of all Republicans told pollsters that good diplomacy was the best way to ensure peace. In the same survey, two-thirds of all Republicans but only one fourth of all Democrats said they would fight for this country "whether it is right or wrong."

Unlike in earlier years, the parties are no longer seen as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. To the contrary, as they sharpen their ideological differences, attentive voters have sharpened their ideological differences. They now like either the Democrats or the Republicans more than they once did, and are less apt to feel neutral toward either one.

How deep does this polarization reach? As measured by opinion polls, the gap between Democrats and Republicans was twice as great in 2004 as in 1972. In fact, rank-and-file Americans disagree more strongly today than did politically active Americans in 1972.

To be sure, this mass polarization involves only a minority of all voters, but the minority is sizable, and a significant part of it is made up of the college-educated. As Marc Hetherington of Vanderbilt puts it: "people with the greatest ability to assimilate new information, those with more formal education, are most affected by elite polarization." And that cohort has undeniably grown.

In 1900, only 10% of all young Americans went to high school. My father, in common with many men his age in the early 20th century, dropped out of school after the eighth grade. Even when I graduated from college, the first in my family to do so, fewer than one-tenth of all Americans over the age of 25 had gone that far. Today, 84% of adult Americans have graduated from high school and nearly 27% have graduated from college. This extraordinary growth in schooling has produced an ever larger audience for political agitation.

Ideologically, an even greater dividing line than undergraduate education is postgraduate education. People who have proceeded beyond college seem to be very different from those who stop with a high-school or college diploma. Thus, about a sixth of all voters describe themselves as liberals, but the figure for those with a postgraduate degree is well over a quarter. In mid-2004, about half of all voters trusted George Bush; less than a third of those with a postgraduate education did. In November of the same year, when over half of all college graduates voted for Mr. Bush, well over half of the smaller cohort who had done postgraduate work voted for Mr. Kerry. According to the Pew Center for Research on the People and the Press, more than half of all Democrats with a postgraduate education supported the antiwar candidacy of Howard Dean.

The effect of postgraduate education is reinforced by being in a profession. Between 1900 and 1960, write John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira in "The Emerging Democratic Majority" (2002), professionals voted pretty much the same way as business managers; by 1988, the former began supporting Democrats while the latter supported Republicans. On the other hand, the effect of postgraduate education seems to outweigh the effect of affluence. For most voters, including college graduates, having higher incomes means becoming more conservative; not so for those with a postgraduate education, whose liberal predilections are immune to the wealth effect.

The results of this linkage between ideology, on the one hand, and congressional polarization, media influence, interest-group demands, and education on the other are easily read in the commentary surrounding the 2004 election. In their zeal to denigrate the president, liberals, pronounced one conservative pundit, had "gone quite around the twist." According to liberal spokesmen, conservatives with their "religious intolerance" and their determination to rewrite the Constitution had so befuddled their fellow Americans that a "great nation was felled by a poisonous nut."

If such wholesale slurs are not signs of polarization, then the word has no meaning. To a degree that we cannot precisely measure, and over issues that we cannot exactly list, polarization has seeped down into the public, where it has assumed the form of a culture war. The sociologist James Davison Hunter, who has written about this phenomenon in a mainly religious context, defines culture war as "political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding." Such conflicts, he writes, which can involve "fundamental ideas about who we are as Americans," are waged both across the religious/secular divide and within religions themselves, where those with an "orthodox" view of moral authority square off against those with a "progressive" view.

To some degree, this terminology is appropriate to today's political situation as well. We are indeed in a culture war in Mr. Hunter's sense, though I believe this war is itself but another component, or another symptom, of the larger ideological polarization that has us in its grip. Conservative thinking on political issues has religious roots, but it also has roots that are fully as secular as anything on the Left. By the same token, the liberal attack on conservatives derives in part from an explicitly "progressive" religious orientation--liberal Protestantism or Catholicism, or Reform Judaism--but in part from the same secular sources shared by many conservatives.

But what, one might ask, is wrong with having well-defined parties arguing vigorously about the issues that matter? Is it possible that polarized politics is a good thing, encouraging sharp debate and clear positions? Perhaps that is true on those issues where reasonable compromises can be devised. But there are two limits to such an arrangement.

First, many Americans believe that unbridgeable political differences have prevented leaders from addressing the problems they were elected to address. As a result, distrust of government mounts, leading to an alienation from politics altogether. The steep decline in popular approval of our national officials has many causes, but surely one of them is that ordinary voters agree among themselves more than political elites agree with each other--and the elites are far more numerous than they once were.

In the 1950s, a committee of the American Political Science Association (APSA) argued the case for a "responsible" two-party system. The model the APSA had in mind was the more ideological and therefore more "coherent" party system of Great Britain. At the time, scarcely anyone thought our parties could be transformed in such a supposedly salutary direction. Instead, as Gov. George Wallace of Alabama put it in his failed third-party bid for the presidency, there was not a "dime's worth of difference" between Democrats and Republicans.

What Wallace forgot was that, however alike the parties were, the public liked them that way. A half-century ago, Tweedledum and Tweedledee enjoyed the support of the American people; the more different they have become, the greater has been the drop in popular confidence in both them and the federal government.

A final drawback of polarization is more profound. Sharpened debate is arguably helpful with respect to domestic issues, but not for the management of important foreign and military matters. The United States, an unrivaled superpower with unparalleled responsibilities for protecting the peace and defeating terrorists, is now forced to discharge those duties with its own political house in disarray.

We fought World War II as a united nation, even against two enemies (Germany and Italy) that had not attacked us. We began the wars in Korea and Vietnam with some degree of unity, too, although it was eventually whittled away. By the early 1990s, when we expelled Iraq from Kuwait, we had to do so over the objections of congressional critics. In 2003 we toppled Saddam Hussein in the face of catcalls from many domestic leaders and opinion-makers. Now, in stabilizing Iraq and helping that country create a new free government, we have proceeded despite intense and mounting criticism, much of it voiced by politicians who before the war agreed that Saddam Hussein was an evil menace in possession of weapons of mass destruction and that we had to remove him.

Denmark or Luxembourg can afford to exhibit domestic anguish and uncertainty over military policy; the United States cannot. A divided America encourages our enemies, disheartens our allies, and saps our resolve--potentially to fatal effect. What Gen. Giap of North Vietnam once said of us is even truer today: America cannot be defeated on the battlefield, but it can be defeated at home. Polarization is a force that can defeat us.


Article

[Plane]

Good find sirs.

I agree with 90%.


And  want to add that the presence of reliable polling constantly done makes the partys cope themselves to the phantom of the centrist voter , rather than leading the public twards any goal we don't already want.

[sirs]

Good addition & thanks for the cudos, Plane     

[sirs]

Another longie, but a goodie
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Shut Up, They Explained
The left's regulatory war against free speech.

BY BRIAN C. ANDERSON
Wednesday, January 25, 2006

The rise of alternative media--political talk radio in the 1980s, cable news in the '90s, and the blogosphere in the new millennium--has broken the liberal monopoly over news and opinion outlets. The left understands acutely the implications of this revolution, blaming much of the Democratic Party's current electoral trouble on the influence of the new media's vigorous conservative voices. Instead of fighting back with ideas, however, today's liberals quietly, relentlessly and illiberally are working to smother this flourishing universe of political discourse under a tangle of campaign-finance and media regulations. Their campaign represents the most sustained attack on free political speech in the United States since the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. Though Republicans have the most to lose in the short run, all Americans who care about our most fundamental rights and the civic health of our democracy need to understand what's going on--and resist it.

The most imminent danger comes from campaign-finance rules, especially those spawned by the 2002 McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act. Republican maverick John McCain's co-sponsorship aside, the bill passed only because of overwhelming Democratic support. It's easy to see why liberals have spearheaded the nation's three-decade experiment with campaign-finance regulation. Seeking to rid politics of "big-money corruption," election-law reforms obstruct the kinds of political speech--political ads and perhaps now the feisty editorializing of the new media--that escape the filter of the mainstream press and the academy, left-wing fiefdoms still regulation-free. Campaign-finance reform, notes columnist George Will, by steadily expanding "government's control of the political campaigns that decide who controls government," advances "liberalism's program of extending government supervision of life."

The irony of campaign-finance reform is that the "corruption" it targets seems not to exist in any widespread sense. Studies galore have found little or no significant influence of campaign contributions on legislators' votes. Ideological commitments, party positions and constituents' wishes are what motivate the typical politician's actions in office. Aha! reformers will often riposte, the corruption is hidden, determining what Congress doesn't do--like enacting big gas taxes. But as Mr. Will notes, "that charge is impossible to refute by disproving a negative." Even so, such conspiracy-theory thinking is transforming election law into what journalist Jonathan Rauch calls "an engine of unlimited political regulation."

McCain-Feingold, the latest and scariest step down that slope, makes it a felony for corporations, nonprofit advocacy groups and labor unions to run ads that criticize--or even name or show--members of Congress within 60 days of a federal election, when such quintessentially political speech might actually persuade voters. It forbids political parties from soliciting or spending "soft money" contributions to publicize the principles and ideas they stand for. Amending the already baffling campaign-finance rules from the 1970s, McCain-Feingold's dizzying do's and don'ts, its detailed and onerous reporting requirements of funding sources--which require a dense 300-page book to lay out--have made running for office, contributing to a candidate or cause, or advocating without an attorney at hand unwise and potentially ruinous.

Not for nothing has Justice Clarence Thomas denounced McCain-Feingold's "unprecedented restrictions" as an "assault on the free exchange of ideas."

Campaign-finance reform has a squeaky-clean image, but the dirty truth is that this speech-throttling legislation is partly the result of a hoax perpetrated by a handful of liberal foundations, led by the venerable Pew Charitable Trusts.

New York Post reporter Ryan Sager exposed the scam when he got hold of a 2004 videotape of former Pew official Sean Treglia telling a roomful of journalists and professors how Pew and other foundations spent years bankrolling various experts, ostensibly independent nonprofits (including the Center for Public Integrity and Democracy 21), and media outlets (NPR got $1.2 million for "news coverage of financial influence in political decision-making")--all aimed at fooling Washington into thinking that Americans were clamoring for reform, when in truth there was little public pressure to "clean up the system." "The target group for all this activity was 535 people in Washington," said Mr. Treglia matter-of-factly, referring to Congress. "The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot--that everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform."

Mr. Treglia urged grantees to keep Pew's role hush-hush. "If Congress thought this was a Pew effort," he confided, "it'd be worthless. It'd be 20 million bucks thrown down the drain." At one point, late in the congressional debate over McCain-Feingold, "we had a scare," Mr. Treglia said. "George Will stumbled across a report we had done. . . . He started to reference the fact that Pew was playing a large role . . . [and] that it was a liberal attempt to hoodwink Congress. . . . The good news, from my perspective, was that journalists . . . just didn't care and nobody followed up." The hoaxers--a conspiracy of eight left-wing foundations, including George Soros's Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation--have actually spent $123 million trying to get other people's money out of politics since 1994, Mr. Sager reports--nearly 90% of the spending by the entire campaign-finance lobby over this period.

The ultimate pipe dream of the reformers is a rigidly egalitarian society, where government makes sure that every individual's influence over politics is exactly the same, regardless of his wealth. Scrutinize the pronouncements of campaign-finance reform groups like the Pew-backed Democracy 21, and you'll see how the meaning of "corruption" morphs into "inequality of influence" in this sense. This notion of corruption--really a Marxoid opposition to inequality of wealth--would have horrified the Founding Fathers, who believed in private property with its attendant inequalities, and who trusted to the clash of factions to ensure that none oppressed the others. The Founders would have seen in the reformers' utopian schemes, in which the power of government makes all equally weak, the embodiment of tyranny.

To eradicate "corruption," leading theorists of campaign-finance reform, such as Ohio State University law professor (and former Ohio state solicitor) Edward Foley, Loyola law prof Richard Hasen, and radical redistributionist philosopher Ronald Dworkin, want to replace privately financed campaigns with a system in which government would guarantee "equal dollars per voter," as Foley puts it, perhaps by giving all Americans the same number of political "coupons," which they could then redeem on the political activities of their choice. This superpowerful government would ban all other political expenditures and require all political groups to get operating licenses from it, with stiff criminal penalties for violators. The experts have even started calling for draconian media restrictions to achieve their egalitarian aims. In Foley's view, the chilling of speech is "the necessary price we must pay in order to have an electoral system that guarantees equal opportunity for all." But when these experts pen law-review articles with titles like "Campaign Finance Laws and the Rupert Murdoch Problem," you know it isn't the New York Times or CBS News that they have in mind.

Campaign-finance reform now has the blogosphere in its crosshairs. When the Federal Election Commission wrote specific rules in 2002 to implement McCain-Feingold, it voted 4-2 to exempt the Web. After all, observed the majority of three Republicans and one Democrat (the agency divides its seats evenly between the two parties), Congress didn't list the Internet among the "public communications"--everything from television to roadside billboards--that the FEC should regulate. Further, "the Internet is virtually a limitless resource, where the speech of one person does not interfere with the speech of anyone else," reasoned Republican commissioner Michael Toner. "Whereas campaign finance regulation is meant to ensure that money in politics does not corrupt candidates or officeholders, or create the appearance thereof, such rationales cannot plausibly be applied to the Internet, where on-line activists can communicate about politics with millions of people at little or no cost."

But when the chief House architects of campaign-finance reform, joined bySens. McCain and Russ Feingold, sued--claiming that the Internet was one big "loophole" that allowed big money to keep on corrupting--a federal judge agreed, ordering the FEC to clamp down on Web politics. Then-commissioner Bradley Smith and the two other Republicans on the FEC couldn't persuade their Democratic colleagues to vote to appeal.

The FEC thus has plunged into what Smith calls a "bizarre" rule-making process that could shackle the political blogosphere. This would be a particular disaster for the right, which has maintained its early advantage over the left in the blogosphere, despite the emergence of big liberal sites like Daily Kos. Some 157 of the top 250 political blogs express right-leaning views, a recent liberal survey found. Reaching a growing and influential audience--hundreds of thousands of readers weekly (including most journalists) for the top conservative sites--the blogosphere has enabled the right to counter the biases of the liberal media mainstream. Without the blogosphere, Howell Raines would still be the New York Times' editor, Dan Rather would only now be retiring, garlanded with praise--and John Kerry might be president of the U.S., assuming that CBS News had gotten away with its falsehood about President Bush's military service that the diligent bloggers at PowerLine, LittleGreenFootballs and other sites swiftly debunked.

Are the hundreds of political blogs that have sprouted over the last few years--21st-century versions of the Revolutionary era's political pamphlets--"press," and thus exempt from FEC regulations? Liberal reform groups like Democracy 21 say no. "We do not believe anyone described as a 'blogger' is by definition entitled to the benefit of the press exemption," they collectively sniffed in a brief to the FEC. "While some bloggers may provide a function very similar to more classical media activities, and thus could reasonably be said to fall within the exemption, others surely do not." The key test, the groups claimed, should be whether the blogger is performing a "legitimate press function." But who decides what is legitimate? And what in the Constitution gives him the authority to do so?

A first, abandoned, draft of proposed FEC Web rules, leaked to the RedState blog last March, regulated all but tiny, password-protected political sites, so bloggers should be worried. Without a general exemption, political blogs could easily find themselves in regulatory hell. Say it's a presidential race, Condi Rice vs. Hillary Clinton. You run a wildly opinionated and popular group blog--call it No to Hillary--that rails daily about the perils of a Clinton restoration and sometimes republishes Rice campaign material. Is your blog making "contributions" to Rice? Maybe. The FEC says that a "contribution" includes "any gift, subscription, loan, advance, or deposit of money or anything of value made by any person for the purpose of influencing any election for Federal office" (my italics). If your anti-Hillary blog spends more than $1,000, you could also find it reclassified as a "political committee." Then you've got countless legal requirements and funding limits to worry about.

In such a regulated Web-world, bloggers and operators of political sites would have to get press exemptions on a case-by-case basis. The results, election-law expert Bob Bauer explains, would be "unpredictable, highly sensitive to subtle differences in facts, and to the political environment of the moment." Even when the outcome is happy, says Mr. Bauer, "a favorable result is still an act of noblesse oblige by a government well aware that if it turns down a request, the disappointed applicant is left with litigation as the only option."

Sites would live in fear of Kafkaesque FEC enforcement actions, often triggered by political rivals' complaints. "If the matter is based on a complaint," notes former FEC counsel Allison Hayward, "the 'respondent' will receive a letter from the FEC with the complaint and will be asked to show why the FEC shouldn't investigate." An investigation involves "the usual tools of civil litigation--document requests, depositions, briefs, and the like." The outcome can take months "or longer" to determine, says Hayward. "If a complaint is filed against you, there will be a flurry of activity while you respond, then perhaps silence--then another letter will arrive and you will be required to respond promptly, then maybe nothing again for months." Most political bloggers aren't paid "professional" reporters or commentators but just democratic citizens with day jobs who like to exercise their right to voice their opinions. If doing so without a lawyer puts them or their families at risk, many will simply stop blogging about politics--or never start.

If you think such fretting is silly, says Bradley Smith, consider the case of Bill Liles, who faced an FEC inquiry when Smith was commissioner. In 2000, a businessman in the little Texas town of Muleshoe, Harvey Bass, painted "Save our nation: Vote Democrat Al Gore for President" on a beat-up box and plunked it on his furniture store's porch. Sick of looking at it, Mr. Liles and a friend pasted a "bigger and better" poster praising George W. Bush on a trailer and parked it right across from Mr. Bass's store. This was too much for another local, Don Dyer, who complained to the FEC that Mr. Liles's sign lacked mandated disclosures about who paid for it and whether Mr. Bush had signed off on it.

Though the FEC in the end let Mr. Liles and his fellow activists off, the men had in fact broken not just disclosure rules but any number of other regulations, too, recalls Mr. Smith. They had clearly spent a bit more than $250 on their makeshift sign, for example, but hadn't reported it, as required, to the FEC. "Total statutory penalties could have easily exceeded $25,000," Mr. Smith observes. How different is Liles's praiseworthy activism from that of many political bloggers? The medium differs, but Mr. Liles, like a blogger, is simply voicing his opinion. And this was pre-McCain-Feingold.

Even if the FEC starts by regulating only a little bit of Web politics, instead of the extensive oversight it had at first planned--and a laxer regime is likelier, thanks to the fierce outburst from political blogs, right and left, when they discovered their freedom of speech under fire--there's no guarantee that the commission won't steadily expand its reach later. "If the history of campaign finance regulation is any guide," notes Commissioner Toner, "once the FEC exercises jurisdiction over the Internet, the Commission's initial set of regulations, even if narrowly tailored, are likely to lead to broader regulation in the future." Right after McCain-Feingold became law, Sen. Feingold opined: "It is only a beginning. It is a modest reform. . . . There will be other reforms." Most campaign-finance reformers share that regulate-to-the-max outlook, aiming--swiftly or incrementally--to close all the loopholes.

Recognizing that McCain-Feingold is out of control, liberty-minded Texas Republican Jeb Hensarling introduced the Online Freedom of Speech Act (HR 1606) in the House last April. (Harry Reid has sponsored identical legislation in the Senate, showing that not all Democrats are lost on the issue.) The bill reinforces the Internet's current regulation-free status by excluding blogs and various other Web communications from campaign-finance strictures. Brought to an expedited vote under special rules that required a two-thirds majority in early November, the bill--opposed strenuously by the campaign-finance reform "movement"--failed. "Today's action marks a sad day for one of our nation's most sacred rights: freedom of speech," reflected Speaker Dennis Hastert. "The last thing this Congress should be doing is trying to stifle public debate online."

The House Democrats torpedoed HR 1606, but they had surprising help from about three dozen Republicans. Why did so many normally staunch opponents of campaign-finance speech restrictions shift camp? One possible explanation, perhaps cynical: It's hard to unseat incumbents, given their advantages of name recognition, free media exposure, and an easier time raising donations. If they can make it harder for their rivals to speak, which campaign-finance rules help them to do, the challenger's task gets harder still. (Notably, after Congress began campaign-finance restrictions in the 1970s, incumbency rates began to rise.) Once in office, some Republicans may suddenly like McCain-Feingold's power to shield them from criticism--including on the Web.

It's not just the blogosphere that's at risk. The left has also begun to use campaign-finance reform--not McCain-Feingold but equally onerous state regulations--to try to shush political talk radio. The oldest of the new media--Rush Limbaugh went national more than 15 years ago--political talk radio is the right's dominion. Not one of the top 20 nationally syndicated political shows features a left-of-center host, and right-leaning radio talkers outnumber liberals 3 to 1. More than 40% of Americans tune in at least occasionally to this extremely influential medium, and more than 20% use it as a primary source of political information. Given the left's continuing inability to compete on the dial--its much-ballyhooed Air America doesn't even register in the Arbitron ratings in some markets--its preferred strategy in the future likely will be to force conservatives like Rush Limbaugh and William Bennett off the air.

Consider what's going on in Washington state as an early warning. Early in 2005, the Democrat-controlled Legislature passed--and Gov. Christine Gregoire, a Democrat, signed--a bill boosting the state's gasoline tax a whopping 9.5 cents per gallon over the next four years, supposedly to fund transportation projects. Thinking that their taxes were already plenty high and that the state's notoriously corrupt Transportation Department would just squander the gas-tax revenues (millions on enviro-friendly wildlife overpasses, for instance, but little on new roads), some citizens organized an initiative campaign, as Washington law allows, to junk the new levy: No New Gas Tax.

Two popular conservative talk radio hosts, Kirby Wilbur and John Carlson, explained why the gas tax was bad news and urged listeners to sign the 225,000 petitions necessary to get the rollback initiative on the November ballot, though they played no official role in the campaign and regularly featured on their shows defenders as well as opponents of the tax hike. With the hosts' help, the petition drive got almost twice the needed signatures, but the ballot initiative, strongly opposed by labor unions, the state's liberal media, environmental groups and other powerful interests, narrowly lost.

Meantime, a group of pro-tax politicians sued No New Gas Tax, arguing that Wilbur's and Carlson's on-air commentaries were "in-kind contributions" and that the antitax campaign had failed to report them to the proper state authorities. The suit sought to stop NNGT from accepting any more of these "contributions" until it disclosed their worth--though how the initiative's organizers could control media discussions or calculate their monetary value remained unclear. The complaint also socked NNGT with civil penalties, attorneys' fees and costs, and other damages. Even more offensively, to litigate the suit the politicians hired a private law firm, Foster Pepper & Shefelman, which serves as bond counsel to Washington state. The firm, which represents unions, hospitals and retirement funds among its other clients, could thus clean up from the state's plan to sell gas-tax-backed bonds. Appearance of corruption, anyone?

The real target of the suit was clearly Wilbur and Carlson, or, more accurately, their corporate employer, Fisher Communications. If NNGT received the "contributions," that meant Fisher had sent them by broadcasting Wilbur's and Carlson's support for the initiative. Washington law limits contributions in the last three weeks of a political campaign to $5,000. Depending on how one measured the dollar worth of on-air "contributions," Fisher could thus face big fines and criminal penalties if it let Wilbur and Carlson keep talking about the gas tax. "Thankfully, Fisher assured us that we could keep talking about the subject on the air, and we did," Wilbur says. The judge ruled in favor of the pro-tax pols, though he finessed the $5,000 limitation problem by ruling only on the "contributions" that occurred prior to the campaign's last three weeks.

The Institute for Justice, a libertarian legal defense group, has entered the fray, filing both an appeal to the Washington Supreme Court and a counterclaim against the politicians behind the suit. "I think this case presents a substantial issue under the First Amendment," institute attorney Bill Maurer explained. "This is one of the most important cases nationally about the right of the press to speak freely, without the interference of the government or regulation of the government--because the power to regulate is the power to suppress." Should the appeal lose, the days of political talk radio could be over not only in Washington State but everywhere. "McCain-Feingold could definitely be used in the same fashion," Mr. Maurer tells me. "In fact, the prosecutors in this case say McCain-Feingold permits them to do this. But pretty much any state that has campaign-finance laws that restrict contributions is subject to this abuse, too."

All this massively begs the question: Why should any American need government permission to express himself? Instead of a media exemption, blogger Glenn Reynolds sarcastically commented at a recent conference, maybe we need a "free speech exception, in which you are allowed to say what you want about political candidates without fear of prosecution by the government."

You'd think that the Supreme Court would have rescued the new media--and the nation--from all this regulatory tyranny. President Bush reportedly agreed not to veto McCain-Feingold only because he was sure the court would do it for him and he could thereby avoid riling up Sen. McCain. After all, the language of the First Amendment is unambiguous: "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." The court has extended First Amendment free-speech protection in recent years to nude dancing, animated online kiddie porn, flag burning, tobacco advertising and cross burning. For its original architects, of course, the First Amendment's chief aim was to protect political speech--the right to criticize the government. The notion that government could restrict the speech of some--which is what campaign-finance rules do--would have been the very definition of unconstitutional tyranny for men like Samuel Adams or James Madison. How could the justices not stop the campaign-finance juggernaut?

Yet the Court's 5-4 McConnell v. FEC ruling approved almost all of McCain-Feingold. The 2003 decision shocked many, but the court's "evolving" jurisprudence in the area of campaign finance should have made it not all that surprising. For the past three decades, the Supreme Court has chopped steadily away at constitutional protection for political speech when campaign finance is at issue. In its 1976 Buckley v. Valeodecision, the court took the first, disastrous step by authorizing the "balancing" of free speech concerns with the "governmental interest" in preventing "the actuality and the appearance of corruption."

The balancing idea has become a liberal commonplace, expressed bluntly by former Democratic House minority leader Richard Gephardt a few years ago: "What we have is two important values in direct conflict: freedom of speech and our desire for healthy campaigns in a healthy democracy." But as commentator Thomas Sowell retorted, whatever Mr. Gephardt's definition of a healthy campaign is, "it is not part of the Constitution of the United States--and free speech is." In fact, it is the bedrock of our healthy democracy.

Buckley's loose language is troubling, too. "The 'appearance of corruption' can mean anything," says former FEC commissioner Smith. "If the 'appearance of corruption' is sufficient to justify regulation, the practical effect is to eliminate the need for the government to show any justification for the regulation in question." In fact, even John McCain, now incorruptible after his involvement as one of the scandalous Keating Five, could appear corrupt. Several aides from his 2000 presidential run, including his former campaign manager, press secretary, finance director and legal counsel have been working for the Reform Institute, a nonprofit group dedicated to (you guessed it) campaign-finance reform--though it primarily seems to be a nascent 2008 McCain for President campaign. Some months back, when Cablevision sought approval for a pricing change from the Senate Commerce Committee, then chaired by Mr. McCain, the company developed a sudden interest in campaign-finance reform and gave the Reform Institute a $200,000 "soft" donation. Looks fishy, no?

Making matters worse, the Supreme Court's 1990 Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce decision redefined "corruption" to mean not just the exchange of political favors for money--seemingly Buckley's view, though the court's opinion is vague--but also "the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public's support for the corporation's political ideas." In other words, the court's majority fully embraced the Inequality = Corruption thinking of the campaign-finance reformers. If corporations had or appeared to have too much influence, government could now stamp out this "corruption" by shutting them up, as McCain-Feingold has done, rather than by the checks and balances of faction against faction, as the Founders envisioned.

In his powerful McConnell dissent, Justice Thomas spelled out "the chilling endpoint" of the court's reasoning: "outright regulation of the press"--exactly what the campaign-reform theorists ultimately seek. "Media companies can run pro-candidate editorials as easily as nonmedia corporations can pay for advertisements," Justice Thomas explained. "Media corporations are influential. There is little doubt that the editorials and commentary they run can affect elections." The Supreme Court has found little to distinguish media and nonmedia corporations. Asked Justice Thomas: "What is to stop a future Congress from determining that the press is 'too influential,' and that the 'appearance of corruption' is significant when media organizations endorse candidates or run 'slanted' or 'biased' news stories in favor of candidates or parties?" Answer: Nothing. "Although today's opinion does not expressly strip the press of First Amendment protection," Justice Thomas warned, "there is no principle of law or logic that would prevent the application of the Court's reasoning in that setting. The press now operates at the whim of Congress."

Perhaps the liberal mainstream media will stop cheering campaign-finance reform when they realize their First Amendment rights are at stake, too.

Though campaign-finance madness is the No. 1 regulatory threat to the new media, it's not the only one. The left is now pushing Congress to restore the Fairness Doctrine, which would kill talk radio and possibly conservative-friendly Fox News, too.  (well well.....could this be perhaps the whole reason for such support by messers Lanya, Terra, and Brass??  Naaaaaaaaaaaaaa    )

For those who don't remember, the Federal Communications Commission's Fairness Doctrine, formalized in the late 1940s but dating back to 1929, required radio and later television stations to cover "vitally important controversial issues of interest in the community served by the broadcaster" and to provide "opportunity for the presentation of contrasting viewpoints on such issues." Any broadcaster that didn't follow these regulations could face fines, free time given to voices that federal regulators felt hadn't gotten fair treatment, and even loss of operating license. Concern that particular partisan views could dominate what was then a very limited broadcast spectrum, which government thought it had to parcel out with the public interest in mind, drove this meddling. But politicians and advocacy groups frequently used (or abused) the Fairness Doctrine to go after their political enemies, as one former Kennedy administration official acknowledged: "Our massive strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass the right-wing broadcasters, and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too costly to continue."

The doctrine made it hard to program political talk radio in today's Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity sense--boisterously opinionated, unafraid to name names, informative and, if you disagree with the host's politics, infuriating. If a station ran a show like Mr. Limbaugh's, drawing upward of 20 million listeners a week, it would also have to run a lefty alternative, even if--as with ratings-challenged Air America in some markets--it can't get any sponsors. Too risky, most radio execs concluded, and kept opinion programs off the air. In 1980, talk shows of any kind numbered fewer than 100 nationwide.

All that changed in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan's free-market-minded FCC stopped enforcing the Fairness Doctrine and then dumped it entirely in 1987. Because cable and satellite television and FM radio had vastly expanded the number of television and radio stations, "the new technological abundance," in regulatory theorist Peter Huber's phrase, had robbed the doctrine of any plausible "scarcity" rationale.

That the doctrine was also "chilling to free speech," as FCC head Mark Fowler argued, became crystal clear after it was gone: AM radio exploded with political talk shows. From under 5% of all programming, "informational" programming expanded to over 20% of the AM mix just seven years after the Fairness Doctrine's demise. Today, more than 1,400 stations feature the talk format exclusively--and the vast majority broadcast conservative voices, because that's what draws the listeners, desperate for an alternative to the liberal mainstream press.

Small wonder, then, that House Democrats proposed two bills in 2005 to bring the Fairness Doctrine back--and as a law, rather than a mere regulation. Rep. Louise Slaughter of New York, who introduced the first of the two bills, says that right-ruled radio is a grave threat to American freedoms, "a waste of good broadcast time, and a waste of our airwaves." People "may hear whatever they please and whatever they choose," she tells PBS's Bill Moyers, in a statement as incoherent as it is illiberal. "And of course they have the right to turn it off. But that's not good enough either. The fact is that they need the responsibility of the people who are licensed to use our airwaves judiciously and responsibly to call them to account if they don't." In other words, people can't be trusted with freedom but need the supervision of a paternalist government.

Ms. Slaughter doesn't want to re-regulate only radio. When asked by Mr. Moyers if she was also proposing the new Fairness Doctrine for Fox News or MSNBC, Slaughter responded: "You bet. . . . Fairness isn't going to hurt anybody." If there's anything liberals hate more than talk radio it's Fox News, which has dominated cable news by appealing to conservative viewers fed up with the broadcast networks' liberal bias. Rep. Maurice Hinchey of New York, sponsor of the second Fairness Doctrine bill, went so far as to host a special Capitol Hill screening of "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism," a "documentary" hit job. Ms. Slaughter, Mr. Hinchey, Vermont socialist Rep. Bernie Sanders, Washington state's Rep. Jay Inslee and several other House lefties have recently formed the Future of American Media Congress to push for a media crackdown.

It's easy to dismiss the Orwellian policy prescriptions of small fry like these. But look who else has been talking about the Fairness Doctrine:

There has been a profound and negative change in the relationship of America's media with America's people," John Kerry told the Boston Globe's Thomas Oliphant after losing the 2004 presidential race. "We learned that the mainstream media, over the course of the last year, did a pretty good job of discerning," he said, inaccurately. "But there's a . . . submedia that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information," he complained. "This all began, incidentally, when the Fairness Doctrine ended," Mr. Kerry maintained. "You would have had a dramatic change in the discussion in this country had we still had a Fairness Doctrine in the course of the last campaign."

Al Gore, in a typically overheated October speech bemoaning the purported hollowing out of the American "marketplace of ideas," blamed it in part on the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, after which "Rush Limbaugh and other hate-mongers began to fill the airwaves." And here's Howard Dean, now chairman of the Democratic National Committee, in a 2003 interview railing against Rupert Murdoch: "I believe we need to reregulate the media . . . so we can be sure that the American people get moderate, conservative and liberal points of view." Mr. Dean noted that he wouldn't need legislation to do this--he could just appoint "different kinds of people" to the FCC.

Finally, in early 2005, an online petition drive called for Americans to "renew the Fairness Doctrine." The imbalance favoring conservative media voices, especially in talk radio, the petition argued, "results in issues of public importance receiving little or no attention, while others are presented in a manner not conducive to listeners' receiving the facts and range of opinions necessary to make informed decisions." One of the three sponsors of this paternalistic document: Media Matters for America, a left-wing press watchdog group, founded by conservative-turned-lefty David Brock, with help from ex-Clinton adviser John Podesta.

These aren't marginal figures; they're the heart of today's Democratic Party. Their calls for reform rest on a preposterous claim: that "media consolidation" has led to a sharp narrowing in the range of viewpoints available to the American people.

In an era of newspapers, magazines, books, broadcast radio and television, cable and satellite television, and the Internet--now joined by satellite radio, podcasts and even newer forms of "technological abundance"--the involved citizen has never had more information, more debate, more ideas from all political perspectives at his fingertips.

What's really happening is that the left, having lost its media monopoly, has had trouble competing in a true "marketplace of ideas" and wants to shut that marketplace down.

If the Democrats take back Congress or the White House, watch out. Nothing would please them more than to drag the country back to the good old days, when liberals didn't have to put up with Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham and Bill O'Reilly and Matt Drudge and the countless other upstarts recasting our public debate.

The right--joined by free-speech defenders from across the political spectrum--needs to defeat the liberal regulatory threat before it does real damage to Americans' rights to express their political views. President Bush should strongly back Rep. Hensarling's Online Freedom of Speech Act, whose sponsors may reintroduce it soon in the House under regular rules, which require only a simple majority to pass it. The president has just nominated three reportedly liberty-minded lawyers to fill FEC vacancies, including Robert Lenhard, part of the legal team that challenged McCain-Feingold's constitutionality. One campaign-finance reform group described the Lenhard pick as "beyond disappointing": excellent news for free-speech fans.

This week, in Wisconsin Right to Life v. FEC, the Supreme Court declined for now to rule definitively on a new challenge to McCain-Feingold. This may be excellent news, since it means the court is likely to decide a future appeal once Sam Alito has replaced Sandra Day O'Connor, who in McConnell cast the deciding vote in favor of McCain-Feingold. If neither Congress nor the Supreme Court does away with this unconstitutional, un-American travesty, we can expect election regulations, in the grim words of Justice Antonin Scalia's McConnell dissent, "to grow more voluminous, more detailed, and more complex in the years to come--and always, always, with the objective of reducing the excessive amount of speech." Thus will our most effective real protection against "the actuality and appearance of corruption"--the First Amendment itself--be nullified.

Lovers of liberty should expose calls to restore the Fairness Doctrine for the fraudulent power-grab that they plainly are. And the right, in particular, needs to understand how much it has benefited from a deregulated media universe. It should be confident that it has the right ideas, and that when it gets the chance to present them directly to the American people--as the new media have allowed it to do--it will win the debate.


Shut up, they explained

[Plane]

Hmmmmmmmmm.....


I do wish it was easyer to know who gave what to who.

[sirs]

Hmmmmmmmmm.....I do wish it was easyer to know who gave what to who.

Lanya wouldn't want you to know that

[sirs]

I think we can safely assume who's in the crosshairs & the primary target of the dishonestly titled "Fairness Doctrine"
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Rush to Victory
Why is Harry Reid acting like David Koresh? Because conservatives are winning.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, April 29, 2005

In 1987, Rush Limbaugh sat down at a microphone at radio station KFBK-AM in Sacramento and began broadcasting something called "The Rush Limbaugh Show."

The rest is history.

The "rest"--the inexorable 15-year rise of conservative ideas and clout across what Howard Stern calls "all media"--is described in a provocative new book by Brian C. Anderson, "South Park Conservatives." What was once a mostly exclusive liberal country club--television, the press, book publishing, even the campuses--has become heavily integrated with aggressive, even crude, conservatives.

As described by Mr. Anderson, a writer with the Manhattan Institute, conservatives established their first beachhead in the early 1990s with talk radio. Then Fox conquered cable news and finally a virtual Mongol horde of conservative-to-libertarian bloggers swept across the Internet. In the 2004 election, these electric horsemen (apologies to Jane Fonda) pulled down Dan Rather and haunted John Kerry's war hero with Swift-boat ghosts.

It is no news that America has become a big backyard pool of opinion, awash with Sean Hannity, Hugh Hewitt, Ann Coulter, Dennis Prager, the Drudge Report and, I'm told, Al Franken.

Contrary to myth, Roger Ailes didn't do this. Ronald Reagan did. Ronald Reagan may not make it to Mount Rushmore for winning the Cold War. But he secured his place in the conservative pantheon for tearing down another wall: the Fairness Doctrine.

The Fairness Doctrine was a federal regulation, dating to 1949, which mandated "contrasting viewpoints" from broadcasters. In reality, the Fairness Doctrine ensured that incumbents got "free" TV coverage across their terms while challengers got crumbs. The Fairness Doctrine was also an early nuclear option: If a local broadcaster's news operation made the local congressman or his party look bad, Washington could threaten to blow up his broadcast license.

Ronald Reagan tore down this wall in 1987 (maybe as spring training for Berlin) and Rush Limbaugh was the first man to proclaim himself liberated from the East Germany of liberal media domination.

It wasn't obvious that conservatives soon would dominate talk radio. Radio programming has always been a soulless decision based on ratings. If programmers thought they could win the drive-time slots with Don Imus reading "Das Kapital," that would be on the air and advertisers would support it. But it's not.

What worked after speech became free in the spectrum ozone was hyper-articulate conservative hosts opening their microphones to millions of hyper-angry conservative voters--not least in such liberal bastions as New York, Boston, and Los Angeles.

In 1994, Newt Gingrich, his Contract With America and the Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1952--the years in which the Fairness Doctrine largely kept politics off the air. This didn't happen because the Gingrich candidates were getting their message out in the Los Angeles Times or Boston Globe.

The conservative media ascendancy chronicled by Brian Anderson has driven many liberals nuts. The liberal media-advocacy group FAIR wants a new Fairness Doctrine to repair "broadcast abuse." Just months ago, FAIR cited "the immense volume of unanswered conservative opinion heard on the airwaves."

What goes around comes around, I suppose. Conservatives would say they're now using radio, TV and the Web--all of it free from political control--to give as good as they got from the 1960s onward. For years, they claim, liberal managers in broadcasting, journalism, publishing and academia marginalized them. Were conservatives imagining that?

Maybe not. Mr. Anderson cites left-wing philosopher Herbert Marcuse (who taught at Columbia, Harvard and Brandeis) urging liberals back then to practice active "intolerance against movements from the Right" in the name of "liberating tolerance." Thus, for example, liberal academics would vote to deny tenure for conservative colleagues--and still do--believing that this is a morally mandated act.

Liberals now marvel at the energy and output of the conservative "movement"--the talk shows, the think tanks, the blogosphere. No need to wonder; they compressed the rocket fuel for the inevitable explosion.

But a price has been paid. What got lost during the years of liberal exclusionism, according to Peter Berkowitz of George Mason University, was "guidance for the negotiation of disagreement in a democracy." No more perfect example of the price the political system has paid for years of conservative shunning exists than the Senate's standoff over judges. You can find the reasons Democrats are shunning the Bush nominees to the appellate bench by consulting the Web site of People for the American Way--abortion, corporate law, minimum wage, Social Security, environment. They disagree with these nominees on--everything.

For Democrats, judicial philosophy is a cultural Armageddon. Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy have turned the Senate into a Branch Davidian compound. No one in the liberal cult is allowed to leave, including the hostage nominees--unless they recant their conservatism. How many Senate Democrats plan to be in this bunker when Bill Frist's ATF squad detonates the "nuclear option"?

Time was, "choice" for conservatives mainly meant accepting one's lot in life. Now they have options, lots of them.


Article

[Plane]

The meia used to be a bastion of liberalism?

I guess it depends on exactly when you take the sample.


Anyway  now that it has been discvered that there is Money in it.....................

[sirs]

The meia used to be a bastion of liberalism?  I guess it depends on exactly when you take the sample.

LOL. 

It's funny Plane, I didn't hear it personally, but I heard about it......Good'ol Rosie O'Donnel was at her foaming best on that show "The View" recently, bascially advocating the notion how KSM was railroaded, tortured to confess his 911 planning, didn't have a laywer, yada, blah, etc.  And it was echowed by 2 of the other gals on the show.  And the the way they were berrating & talking (actually yelling) over the 1 reasonable voice in Elizabeth Hasselbeck, who actually isn't a big Bush supporter either, but at least tries to provide some rational dialog, was beyond childish & immature. 

If we were to apply the "Fairness Doctrine" upon this media source, you think folks like Lanya would be supportive of Rosie not being able to spew her garbage unless there were an equal # of Ann Coulter's on the show?  Me thinks not   

[Plane]

If Allan Combs and Shawn Hannady were to give their Chairs to Rosie O'Donnell and Ann Coulter and take a vacation it would outgross the world series.

[sirs]

[sirs]

The Barker and the Shill: The Fraud of the Fairness Doctrine
By Selwyn Duke
January 24, 2007

If you're old enough to remember the days when freak shows were in carnivals and not daytime television, you may know about the barker and the shill.  These were carnival employees who both worked to entice customers into entering the mysterious realm of the sideshow, only, their methods were very different.  The barker - the correct terminology is the "talker" - was a P.T. Barnum-like character, a bold salesman who sang the praises of the exhibits.  Although he was given to the hyperbole of marketing, he made no bones about his agenda: He wanted your business.

The shill was a very different animal.  His job was to stand amidst the crowd and pose as one of their number; he would then feign awe as he claimed to have seen the show and that it was truly a jaw-dropping experience.  He was trading on his illusion of impartiality, knowing it lent him a capacity to convince that eluded the talker with his obvious agenda.

This occurs to me when I ponder the attempt to resurrect the "Fairness Doctrine" by politicians such as Congressman Dennis Kucinich and avowedly socialist Senator Bernie Sanders.  For those of you not acquainted with this proposal, it harks back to a federal regulation in place from 1949 to 1987.  Ostensibly it was designed to ensure "fairness" in broadcasting, mandating that if radio and TV stations air controversial viewpoints, they must provide equal time for the "other" side.

Now, as many have pointed out, this effort is motivated by a desire to stifle conservative commentary.  After all, it isn't lost on the radical left that the dumping of this doctrine in 1987 directly coincided with the rise of conservative talk radio.  Freed from the threat of hefty government fines, stations were finally able to formulate programs based on market forces and not government regulation.  Thus did Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and many others give voice to the usually silent majority.

Of course, many may wonder why I'd take issue with fairness.  Shouldn't we give the "other side" its day in court, one may ask? 

The problem is that this regulation would be applied to talk radio but not arenas dominated by liberal thought, a perfect example of which is the ever-present mainstream media (which presents the "other side").  This is because talk show hosts trade in red meat commentary, whereas the mainstream press is more subtle in its opinion-making. 

Fine then, say the critics, that's as it should be.  We don't have to worry about "responsible journalists"; it's those acid-tongued firebrands who pollute discourse with their pyro-polemics who bedevil us.  And on the surface this sounds convincing, which is why I tell you of the talker and the shill.

The dirty little secret behind the Fairness Doctrine is that it punishes the honest.  Think about it: Radio hosts are the talkers; they wear their banners openly as they proclaim who and what they are.  Sure, they may be brash and hyperbolic, loud and oft-sardonic, but there is no pretense, little guile, and you know what they want you to believe.  You know what they're sellin' and if you're buyin'.

The mainstream media, however, is a shill.  Oh, not shills working with talk radio, of course, as their talkers are entities such as MoveOn.org and Media Matters, but they are shills nonetheless.  They masquerade as impartial purveyors of information, almost-automatons who, like Joe Friday, are just interested in the facts, ma'am.  They flutter their eyes and read their Teleprompters, and we are to believe God graced them with a singular ability to render facts uncolored by personal perspective.

In reality, though, the Shill Media are about as impartial as an Imam in a comparative religion class.  Let's not forget that they;
- used to call Republican reductions in the rate of spending growth "budget cuts,"
- have a habit of referring to pro-lifers as "anti-abortion groups" (they don't call pro-choice groups "pro-abortion")
- and to terrorists as insurgents or even "freedom fighters,"
- and only seem to perceive hate crime when the victim's group has victim status. 

And while I can't comprehensively document news bias here, suffice it to say the Shill Media are at least as ideologically monolithic as talk radio.  Why, in 1992, 89 percent of Washington journalists voted for Bill Clinton; in 1996 the figure was 92 percent.  Even outside the Beltway liberal bias reigns, with scribes so situated favoring Democrats by about a three to one margin.

But the point here isn't the nature or pervasiveness of the bias, but its insidiousness.  The Shill Media are infinitely more dangerous because of their illusion of impartiality.  There's a reason why we trust what Consumer Reports says about Buick a lot more than what Buick says about Buick.  And if we discovered that Buick's marketing arm was masquerading as a consumer advocacy magazine, we'd want the subterfuge revealed.  Remember, brainwashing is only effective if you're not aware it's occurring.

This is why the Fairness Doctrine is an insult to the intelligence of anyone possessing more than a modicum of that quality.  Its message is, hey, hide your bias well, be a slick propagandist and you'll proceed unmolested.  But dare not tell the truth or be so bold as to bare your soul.  Like an ostentatious literary critic, we appreciate subtlety and abhor straightness.  Lying lips trump truthful tongues, don't you know? 

Thus, far better than a fairness doctrine would be a "Truth in Media Doctrine."  And here's its mandate: When a correspondent is shown on the nightly news, there must be a caption to the effect of, "Dan Rather, Clinton-Gore-Kerry voter" or "Katie Couric, lifelong Democrat." 

Hey, why not?  Let's strip the masks off the shills.  Otherwise, it's a bit like letting Mullah Omar sing the praises of Islam while dressed as a Catholic priest.  And shouldn't these "responsible journalists" be at least as honest as those troglodytes in talk radio?

I wax satirical but, in reality, ensuring truthfulness is far easier than securing fairness.  In fact, how could the latter possibly be achieved?  After all, media bias lies not just in how news is reported but also in what they choose to report on in the first place. 
Why do they decide to focus on sex-discrimination in the construction industry instead of transgressions by abortionists? 
Why Abu Ghraib instead of the oil-for-food scandal? 
Why that which helps or harms one cause but not another?

The fact is that the media choose the social battlefields and decide which way salvos will be fired.  Human judgement is in play when they decide whether to broadcast or bury, how often a story will run, what terminology will describe it and what imagery will attend it.

Then, the idea that fairness is ensured by disseminating the "other side" presupposes that there are only two sides, but an issue isn't a coin.  There are often a multitude of sides, therefore, a dictate to present both sides simply means government input in the process of discrimination.  After all, two sides will be chosen from among many.  What about the libertarians, Greens, Vermont Progressives, Constitutionalists, Christian Freedom Party members and communists?  Oh, silly me, I forgot.  The communists are giving us the Fairness Doctrine.

Of course, some will say the other side is simply a refutation of the talkers' controversial positions.  But here I note that much of talk radio commentary is in fact a refutation of Shill Media positions.  Thus, insofar as this goes, talk radio doesn't need to be balanced by the other side.

It is the other side.

So, affirmative-action and quotas in commentary?  Please.  Should I think Big Brother capable of factoring millions of different elements into a media formula and developing a paradigm for fairness?  Sure, let's have the Post Office run the press.

Of course, the dirty little secret is that the Fairness Doctrine is about everything but.  Its proponents are political shills, bristling at the fact that their talk radio test balloon, Airhead America, only succeeded in talking its way into Chapter 11.  Their spirit is the same one that gives us speech codes in colleges and corporations, the effort to stifle grassroots lobbying and hate speech laws.  Perhaps it's that those who can teach, do, and those who can't, legislate.     

You know, there's an image conjured up by this scheme, that of a sullen, pouty little child complaining, "That's not fair!" and stamping his foot with arms akimbo.  But as John F. Kennedy observed, "Life's not fair." 
                                                                                                                                   
No, it certainly isn't.  Some people are born with intelligence, others aren't.  Some people possess logic, reason, sound ideas, philosophical depth and powers of persuasion, others don't. 

I guess the less gifted's recourse to this ploy is a tacit admission that they bring no ammunition to the battlefield of debate.  And now it seems they fancy big government a substitute for big ideas.


The Fraud of the Fairness Doctrine