Reviving the Fairness Doctrine?

What's fair about this?

What Feinstein really wants is for federal bureaucrats to decide what political opinion programming we should hear. She presumes to know better than listeners what is “fair.” . . .

What is especially revealing about these trial balloons for renewed regulation of political speech is that America already has an incredible diversity of media giving vent to opinion and commentary on every conceivable issue in public policy.

Thanks to the Internet, America is in the midst of an unprecedented political news and commentary explosion. Anybody with an opinion can start a blog that can be read by anyone in the world with an Internet connection. There are literally millions of political blogs, podcasts, video blogs and blog-based radio operations providing analyses from every conceivable ideological position.

Political expression in America is being liberated as has never before been done in human history. Why does that bother Feinstein, Boxer, Clinton, Kucinich and other Fairness Doctrine advocates?

Read the whole thing.

There is nothing fair about the Fairness Doctrine. It is merely an attempt of politicians to silence Americans who disagree with them. It is both reprehensible and completely at odds with any notion of free speech.

I'm optimistic that with the proliferation of blogs, podcasts, YouTube, and the rise of "amateur media", too many people would be affected by this to make it politically viable.

Here are more thoughts on this:

The Internet has done more to create the sort of media that scarcity critics claim to desire than any other technology. Every man, woman, and child can have a “newspaper” or broadcast outlet today—it’s called a website, blog, or podcast. It’s hard to imagine how the political blogosphere could be more diverse, ranging from the Daily Kos and the Huffington Post on the left to National Review Online and Power Line on the right to Andrew Sullivan, Instapundit, and Buzz Machine somewhere in between. A political junkie must hustle to keep up with what RealClearPolitics posts on its site every day.

When Rush Limbaugh has more listeners than NPR, or Tom Clancy sells more books than Noam Chomsky, or Motor Trend gets more subscribers than Mother Jones, liberals want to convince us (or themselves, perhaps) that it’s all because of some catastrophic market failure or a grand corporate conspiracy to dumb down the masses. In reality, it’s just the result of consumer choice. All the opinions that the Left’s media critics favor are now readily available to us via multiple platforms. But that’s not good enough, it seems: they won’t rest until all of us are watching, reading, and listening to the content that they prefer.

I don't get it... where's the suppression?

If politicians are worried about getting their ideas out, there are literally millions of avenues available to them. Any idea worth considering (and many that aren't) have no problem being disseminated to the American public. Despite ridiculous claims of information suppression, no one individual, organization, or group is in controls the gates of what information gets to the public. This creates a problem for many politicians who prefer to control what information you have access to. If you can't compete with ideas, the next best thing is to try to supress them...

(HT Instapundit)