American Thinker: The Fairness Doctrine Engine Starter

American Thinker: The Fairness Doctrine Engine Starter:

"They prefer a quick snapshot of political talk on the radio and discover to
their chagrin that the number of hours of programming is 10 to 1 conservative,
and the number of stations is 76/24 percent conservative/liberal. How could this
be? The facts all by themselves tell a compelling story of structural imbalance.
It must be corrected by a comprehensive program of government compulsion, they
write, including a tax to support public radio."

While this idea has been hyped beyond reason, I want to bring it up once again. This is censorship and it is wrong. The idea is that a radio station instead of offering 4 hours of conservative talk would instead offer two hours conservative talk and two hours of liberal talk.The idea being that the public would hear more opinions and thus be better informed. The problem is that a radio station operator is more likely to offer no political speech, and choose not to bother with it than to offer balanced political speech.

The radio is not the only, and for most Americans it isn't the chief form of media information. If this idea were to spread to other mediums, what would it mean for them. What if they came to bloggers and told them that you would have to publish equal coverage of conservative and liberal thoughts? As a blogger myself I know what I would do. I would stop the posts about McCain and Edwards and publish even more posts about Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.

It is not the role of the government to tell us what we should be broadcasting/publishing and what we should be reading or listening to.