The American Guesser

Reuters has an interesting story about powerful senators who really, really, really want to see the Fairness Doctrine come back. And yes, people, the article does state that President-elect Obama is on record as opposing a Fairness Doctrine comeback.

Several points:

He has not stated that he would veto a new Fairness Doctrine.

He might be willing to trade his opposition to the Fairness Doctrine for something else, or simply might not be opposed enough to fight to keep it from becoming law if it’s attached to another bill.

And as the article points out, there are other ways to skin a cat:

Obama has called on Henry Rivera, who was a commissioner in the 1980s when the Fairness Doctrine existed, to oversee the FCC transition process. Rivera is a supporter of bringing back the provisions. And heading Obama’s overall transition team is John Podesta, head of liberal think tank the Center for American Progress. Last year, the CAP issued a report called “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio.”

While the CAP stopped short of advocating a return of the Fairness Doctrine, it did support more stringent adherence to so-called localism, which critics consider a back door to requiring that stations ditch some of their conservative hosts.

The FCC is considering the matter now, weighing such questions as whether to require stations to create “community advisory boards” made up of “local officials and other community leaders.” The boards would tell radio executives whether the content they broadcast is adequately addressing the needs of the community, subject to the board’s interpretation.

In other words, Obama isn’t going to demand that stations like WMBD1470 gut their profitable programing by requiring the station to hand over free air time to anyone who disagrees with an opinion Rush Limbaugh states.

No, what Obama and his minions on the FCC are going to require that the station — ALL stations — let volunteers from the community decide what programing to air.

In other words, fairness and equity will be mandatory.

Here’s another idea: Just demand that the FCC finally free up those low-power FM licenses that they’ve kept on hold at the behest of Big Media for years. Let these new license holders — presumably members of the local community — compete in the free marketplaces of both commerce and ideas.

From 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.

If Democrats end up with a veto-proof and filibuster-proof majorities, there’s a good chance they could succeed in re-establishing the fairness doctrine. I discussed the possibility at my other site. But James Fish of the Constitutional Matters Project had this to add:

This would be the end of political talk and opinion shows over broadcast media. That would be tragic, however, it could get worse. Presently Washington cannot regulate cable and Internet content. There is nothing to prevent the government from declaring cable and Internet are “Interstate Commerce” and subject them to the same rules as broadcast. If the Supreme Court were to declare this takeover “Constitutional” it will be the death knell for “Free Speech” and no democracy can exist without it.

One would hope there are at least a handful of Democrats who would put the breaks on this.