If liberals had any brains, they would drop their “Bring Back the Fairness Doctrine” campaign after taking those five words to heart.
Because if they get that legislation, in the grave (where it belongs) since 1987, put back into law, they’re going to have to grant equal airtime to Limbaugh on AA and NPR, just as they want the stations that carry Limbaugh to grant equal time to the likes of Al Franken and Keith Olbermann.
As NewsBusters reports, former president Bill Clinton has joined some prominent Democrat lawmakers in begging that the Fairness Doctrine (which really isn’t) be put back into law. Folks, this is just a reminder of how someone such as myself who voted both times for Clinton began to see right through the guy a little more than a decade ago.
Clinton says “there’s always been a lot of big money to support the right wing talk shows.” He’s right, of course. It’s called advertising revenue. As someone who works in the media, even I can understand this concept. The HR has staff members that go out and sell advertising space in the newspaper. Weekly and bi-weekly newspapers’ revenues aren’t determined by subscriptions and rack sales alone. We could all sell out every issue we print and still it wouldn’t likely be enough to sustain the day-to-day operations. Hence, the grocery ads that fall out of the middle of the Wednesday paper, the half-page ad for the hospital on Page 2, the downtown stores’ sales pitches on Page 3, the “Lordy, Lordy, Look Who’s 40″ ads on Page 5. The advertisers see customers come in and buy things, and when they tell the clerk that they’re buying Product X at their store because of an ad they saw in the HR, that’s prompting enough for said advertiser to continue to advertise.
In Limbaugh’s case, listenership equals ratings equals advertising revenue equals Rush stays on the air. (The fact that Rush just plain says things that people want to hear notwithstanding, of course.) Under the Fairness Doctrine, supposedly, listenership gets reduced when Rush fans begin to hear Fairness Doctrine-mandated counterpoint and decide to turn their radios off and/or stop supporting the advertisers whose revenue keeps the radio station going. That equals radio stations being turned into automats where only the head office gets to make the decisions, not the listeners or the advertisers.
And don’t believe for one second the rhetoric about “bringing accountability to the airwaves.” All this talk about bringing back the Fairness Doctrine has nothing to do with accountability. It’s all about jealousy. Meaning that liberals, after watching NPR struggle with funding from the government and witnessing the prolonged, Titanic-style sinking of Air America due to infighting, mismanagement and low ratings, can’t get what they want in a free market, so they have to beg Mama Congress to get it for them, and they will bang the tables of their high chairs, scream and kick until they get it, when what they need is a good, hard spanking.
Granted, Limbaugh’s got a lot of good things to say on his show, but for the record, I really don’t care that much for the guy because he’s got an ego two states wide that tends to obscure what he’s saying too much of the time. But to say that the likes of Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and others should give way to liberal talkers on their stations without them getting equal time on NPR in return is absolutely ludicrous and, of course, unfair. When it comes to free enterprise, there are just some things that the government shouldn’t mandate.
Besides, if you don’t like what’s on the radio, remember that you can turn it down or off. You don’t need the government to do that for you.
On the other hand, imagine my surprise in agreeing with Clinton on this statement about Limbaugh:
…let’s face it, Rush Limbaugh is fairly entertaining, even when he’s saying things that I think are ridiculous.
Remember that Limbaugh’s radio and TV campaigns really picked up speed during the Clinton administration, particularly with all the things Limbaugh said about Clinton and the whole “America Held Hostage” counter detailing how many days Old No. 42 had left in office. For Clinton to say that is equivalent to Bush 43 responding to his detractors by saying how wonderful it is that we can live in a free country and have such dissent, in my mind.
Obama’s made it known in the past that he wouldn’t support the Fairness Doctrine if the Dems decide to dredge it up again. First Amendment fans such as myself can only hope it sticks, should this campaign go so far as to merit the veto stamp. We shall see.
