Clamping Down On the First Amendment

The Obama administration doesn't need to bring back the Fairness Doctrine to silence the opposition, all they need to do is attack local radio stations and impose impossible fines to do it.

And if Mark Lloyd, Obama's "Chief Diversity Officer" has his way, that's what's going to happen. Not by reimplementing the Fairness Doctrine, but, doing so by imposing fees that would financially break a broadcasting company and he would also do it by threatening local radio stations.

The Fairness Doctrine was created in 1949 by the Federal Communications Division that made companies with broadcasting licenses to present controversial political issues in a fair and balanced way. Back in those days there were only three stations broadcasting news and political topics and the Fairness Doctrine was necessary to present fair and balanced points of view. In 1987, the FCC did away with it and placed broadcasting into the market place and since then, broadcasting companies have either failed or succeeded based on consumer support or the lack of it. Essentially, this means that if you don't like what you are hearing or seeing then you can change the channel.

Politicians, both Democrat and Republican, have stated repeatedly that reimplementing the Fairness Doctrine is not going to happen. Back in March, Harry Reid said, “The Fairness Doctrine, what a ghost that doesn’t exist. None of us want to go back to the way it was before. It is an issue they brought up to talk about. No one wants to re-establish the Fairness Doctrine, Democrats or Republicans.”

The month prior, Senator Jim DeMint proposed an amendment to the D.C. Voting Rights Act that would permanently ban reimplementation of the Fairness Doctrine. The amendment passed 87-11 and Reid voted for the amendment. However, Dick Durbin proposed a separate amendment that says certain affirmative actions are required of the FCC, including actions to encourage and promote diversity in communication media ownership and to ensure that broadcast station licenses are used in the public interest. This amendment also passed, on a vote of 57-41 and Harry Reid voted for it.

Conservative talk radio sees Dick Durbin's amendment as a means to shut them down. But, his amendment isn't what Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck among others are worried about. They are more concerned about Mark Lloyd, a Saul Alinskyite who's recent rhetoric smacks of fascism, communism and all those other isms that this country can do without.

In his 2006 book, “Prologue to a Farce: Communications and Democracy in America”, Lloyd called for a “confrontational movement” to combat what he claimed was control of the media by international corporations and to re-establish the regulatory power of government through robust public broadcasting and a more powerful FCC.

Glenn Beck did a piece on his show and this disgusting reprobate said this:



And it doesn't stop with Mark Lloyd. Senator Rockefeller has introduced S. 773 Cybersecurity Act, which gives the president the power to shut down the Internet in the private sector in the event of an "emergency". What classifies as an emergency can by anyone's guess, but, suffice it to say that this is just another means of clamping down on opposing point of view.

So, it goes something like this: Mark Lloyd thinks that there is too much free speech and wants to curb that pesky First Amendment right and Rockefeller takes it a step further and wants to give the president power to shut down the Internet in the private sector in the event of an "emergency". Recalling the outrage over the Patriot Act the silence is deafening about these issues.