Nancy Pelosi vs. the Internet

selil writes "A story popped up on the ChicagoBoyz Blog. It says 'Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who would like very much to reimpose the old, so-called, "Fairness Doctrine" that once censored conservative opinion on television and radio broadcasting, is scheming to impose rules barring any member of Congress from posting opinions on any internet site without first obtaining prior approval from the Democratic leadership of Congress. No blogs, twitter, online forums — nothing.'"

Comments

The democratic party in a nutshell:

[Anonymous Coward]

"We know what's best for you"

Re:The democratic party in a nutshell:

[sm62704]

Thank you for that; depending on how many states the Greens are on the ballot in, I'll vote for them or alternately Bob Barr, the fake Libertarian. From TFB:

Fairness Doctrine" that once censored conservative opinion on television and radio broadcasting

What a load of horse shit. If the "liberals" said domething they had to counter it with a "conservative" stance. Apparently the submitter thinks it's OK to censor Dems but not Repubs. Actually it's the other three parties that are being censored; so much that I bet few of you even know who their candidates are.

And the conrporate media wants to keep it that way so the corporations only have two candidates to bribe.

The only thing the "liberals" want to be liberal with is my money, and the only thing the conservatives want to conserve is their own.

Re:The democratic party in a nutshell:

[tuba_ranger]

The Democratic and Republican parties are two sides of the same coin.

More like two cheeks of the same horses ass.

Re:The democratic party in a nutshell:

[DriedClexler]

While I agree with your general point about the marginalization of third parties, I think this statement of yours is based on an insufficient understanding of the history of the Fairness Doctrine:

What a load of horse shit. If the "liberals" said domething they had to counter it with a "conservative" stance. Apparently the submitter thinks it's OK to censor Dems but not Repubs

What led to the submitter summary was this: Basically, virtually all talk show hosts capable of garnering an audience were conservative. So if a radio station wanted to have one of these guys, they'd have to have a liberal respond. At risk of sounding trollish (but this is just the history) the liberal response would be boring and lose listeners.

Again, I'm not trying to troll: the fact that conservatives had more mass appeal on radio could just as well be due to their oversimplification of the issues.

The upshot is, because radio shows couldn't justify the loss of listeners through the liberal response, via the gain through the conservative talk show hosts, the result of the Fairness Doctrine was much more detrimental to conservatives.

So yes, in theory it applies equally, but as the saying goes, "The law forbids the rich from sleeping under bridges, just the same as it does the poor."

See: any history of the Fairness Doctrine.

Re:The democratic party in a nutshell:

[Sponge Bath]

...two cheeks of the same horses ass.

That stuff coming out from between must be compromise legislation.

Direct link to the letter in question

[FrameRotBlues]

Here's a direct link to the letter in question.

This must be reliable

[Champ]

So, Submitter says that the right-wing Chicagoboyz blog says that Congressman Culberson says that Congrassman Brady says that Congressman Capuano says that Majority Leader Pelosi says she wants to stifle free spech?

EVERYBODY PANIC!

Not anything like what the abstract says

[grolaw]

This is a regulation of HOUSE MEMBERS usage of the Internet - not the general public. Look at the linked letter: http://gopleader.gov/UploadedFiles/Capuano_letter.PDF

The AS ASS above thinks that the Dems are manipulating the general public's right to free political speech, he is dead wrong.

The limits are to be placed upon Members of Congress and their staff and merely require that the material is vetted (I approved this ....) and that limitation of the staff's right to engage in political speech is included, too (it already is restricted - See, the Hatch Act, http://www.osc.gov/hatchact.htm ). RTFA.

Total Crap

[loteck]

From the PDF of the letter in question:

"Please note that nothing in these recommendations should b e construed as a recommendation to change the current House rules and regulations governing the content of official communications."

This is an attempt to deal with technical issues and update existing House rules to keep up with technology. There's a lot of FUD in the article summary and in TFA.

Anyone read the actual sources?

[spun]

Here is the actual letter they reference: http://gopleader.gov/UploadedFiles/Capuano_letter.PDF

I'm sorry, but I don't understand how they can draw those conclusions from the source they reference. And I don't see anything about Pelosi. The letter seems to say that people can post stuff on outside servers, provided there is a way of verifying it really came from who it says its from. Whoah! Scandal!

Why is Slashdot posting links to crazy right wing/libertartian conspiracy theories? This is stupid.

Summary Over the Top and Dead Wrong

[Sponge Bath]

I've read the PDF about the *suggested* changes.

Currently there are rules governing the posting of *official* House of Reps material which includes the requirement that such posts are done in the house.gov domain.
The suggested change allows that material to be hosted on external servers subject to the *existing rules*.

It says *nothing* about prohibiting posting of opinions by house members on any web site. Nothing.

Re:Conservatives Censored by Fairness Doctrine

[Anonymous Coward]

Reality has a well known liberal bias. Any law that forces news outlets to reflect reality as it exists rather than as we conservatives wish it were is UNFAIR. Thank God for Fox News.

Re:hradek

[mhall119]

they are too busy using Iraqi babies as skeet shooting targets

Did they run out of lawyers already?

Fraud Alert: Slashvertisement?

[Futurepower(R)]

Fraud Alert: The Slashdot story seems to be without support elsewhere. It may be a paid Slashvertisement.

Also, if you read the PDF of the letter mentioned, it is about technical limitations of U.S. government support for internet access. The rules proposed seem very sensible. The letter says NOTHING about Nancy Pelosi.

Re:Fraud Alert: Slashvertisement?

[Talderas]

It wasn't created to target Conservatives, however what the purpose of reviving it appears to be geared towards targeting Conservative talk radio.

Walk with me, if you will. You can get both Conservative and Liberal leaning news from websites, television and newspapers. However, the same cannot be said about radio. It is dominated by Conservative talk radio, and the only Liberal talk radio has survived essentially subsidized by the government.

Any medium of news is subsidized through ad revenue, and ad revenue is based upon the ratings of the shows during which they air. Rush Limbaugh along generates a constant 13.6 million listeners during the course of his 3 hours show. On the other hand, the best ratings I've found for Air America is 1.5 million unique listens over a week. Air America just doesn't generate enough ad revenue to keep it in enough markets, proof being that they had to file for bankruptcy.

Now how does all of this and the fairness doctrine show an attempt to censor conservative talk radio?

Ratings show that liberal talk radio just cannot compete against conservative talk radio. It doesn't get carried, or it gets dismally low ratings. Radio stations that carried shows like Rush's would be required to carry liberal shows (or at least the liberals mentioned) for the same amount of time. Mind you, the Fairness Doctrine applies to stations, not the individuals that produce the shows the stations carry.

Now with the fairness doctrine, a station would almost certainly be forced to carry 3 hours of Air America for every 3 hours of Rush's show in order to make close to the balance required by the act. You won't get Rush letting liberals on his show to defend themselves against his points, so the stations need to adapt as best they can. Here's where the problem comes, since the liberal shows will not draw as much revenue as the conservative ones, it may cost the station enough revenue that they wouldn't be able to operate in the black. Since they're hijacked by the law to reduce their revenue, they either go out of business, or get non-controversial programing that allows them to operate in the black.

Re:Nancy Pelosi is VERY weak

[mrsteveman1]

Morally, and in the upper arms.

Re:Conservatives Censored by Fairness Doctrine

[cptnapalm]

Quote One:
Bill Ruder, an assistant secretary of commerce under President Kennedy, noted, "Our massive strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters in the hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue."

Quote Two:
In a confidential report to the DNC, Martin Firestone, a Washington attorney and former FCC staffer, explained,

"The right-wingers operate on a strictly cash basis and it is for this reason that they are carried by so many small stations. Were our efforts to be continued on a year-round basis, we would find that many of these stations would consider the broadcasts of these programs bothersome and burdensome (especially if they are ultimately required to give us free time) and would start dropping the programs from their broadcast schedule."

https://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-270.html

Cited.

Unfairness doctrine.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The fairness doctrine doesn't censor anything.
It allows for equal time and space of people with opposing or different views.

No. It REQUIRES equal time and space for people with opposing or different views. Big difference.

Conservative talk radio is a business, collecting revenue by attracting ears for advertisers. It spends long blocks of time - like three hour chunks - on particular points of view. The fairness doctrine would require stations playing it to give equal blocks of time - in equivalent timeslots - to anti-conservative viewpoints, which would NOT attract the target demographic. This would be a massive financial hit (in a number of ways) on any station that played a talk show with enough of a point-of-view to invoke the doctrine.

The result would be that such stations would drop political talk shows entirely. This would leave the entire political content of stations coming from their news coverage (which has been shown, by an objective scale developed by Stanford and UCLA researchers, to be massively left-biased). The entertainment content is similarly left-biased (though not subject to the methodology used on news coverage.) As one big talk show host says: "I AM equal time!"

The left has just as much opportunity to field its own talk shows with its own biases. And it has tried, several times. But (with a few notable exceptions in extremely liberal areas, such as KGO radio in San Francisco) their content has failed to attract enough of an audience to be profitable. So shutting down political talk radio by reinstitution of the so-called "fairness doctrine" would have the effect of massively suppressing conservative political viewpoints on broadcast media.

A flip side is that the conservatives could potentially start a news organization of their own, covering conservative viewpoints. Indeed, this HAS been done to some extent, in the form of Fox News. But FNN has shown its true colors in the primary season: It covers only ONE of the four or so major conservative factions' positions and is perfectly happy to blatantly suppress the others.

Starting a new wholly-owned NETWORK by buying a little station in each major market is forbidden by FCC rules, which limit the amount of the population stations owned by a single entity can reach to well under 50%. So they'd have to recruit a lot of independents. (And you can bet, if they were succeeding, there would be attempts to invoke the fairness doctrine against them, adding massive legal costs to the equation.)

So with talk radio as the only broadcast outlet for conservative political thought (but not effective for liberal positions), and liberal political thought dominating entertainment content and most news coverage, shutting down political talk radio by reimposing the fairness doctrine would be a massive blow to the right and a victory for the left.