Good news, bad news regarding Obama and free speech
November 25, 2008From Reason Online, a look at whether or not the election of Barack Obama is bad news for freedom of speech on radio, television and the Internet:
First the good news: The fairness doctrine is still dead, and it probably will stay dead even if Barack Obama becomes president. The doctrine, a rule that gave the government the power to punish broadcasters for being insufficiently balanced, was killed off 21 years ago. It isn’t likely to return, despite persistent rumors that the regulation’s rotting corpse will crawl from its coffin and disembowel Rush Limbaugh.
Now the bad news. There’s a host of other broadcast regulations that Obama has not foresworn. In the worst-case scenario, they suggest a world where the FCC creates intrusive new rules by fiat, meddles more with the content of stations’ programs, and uses the pending extensions of broadband access as an opportunity to put its paws on the Internet. At a time when cultural production has been exploding, fueled by increasingly diverse and participatory new media, we would be stepping back toward the days when the broadcast media were a centralized and cozy public-private partnership.
[snip]
Now the bad news. There’s a host of other broadcast regulations that Obama has not foresworn. In the worst-case scenario, they suggest a world where the FCC creates intrusive new rules by fiat, meddles more with the content of stations’ programs, and uses the pending extensions of broadband access as an opportunity to put its paws on the Internet. At a time when cultural production has been exploding, fueled by increasingly diverse and participatory new media, we would be stepping back toward the days when the broadcast media were a centralized and cozy public-private partnership.
Tags: Barack Obama, Fairness Doctrine, FCC
November 25th, 2008 at 7:56 am
There’s nothing to fear here. Move along.
So the man hasn’t “foresworn” anything yet? You mean he actually wants to look at what’s on the table and confer with people before he makes a decision? What in the world is he thinking?
And as I have said on other blogs at other times, and the columnist you referenced feels the same: the Fairness Doctrine isn’t coming back. It was a nice campaign tactic, but it’s not coming back. Rabid right-wingers can relax, they can still have their radio shows full of lies and slanders, even though the 2008 campaign has exposed them for what they truly are: entirely irrelavent.