Free Republic

Excerpted from "Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA" Imagine a world without the New York Times, Fox News, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and countless other tools used by the 1 percent to rule and fool. In a socialist society run by and for the working people it represents, the mega-monopolies like Walmart, Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil, and the corporations that run the tightly controlled “mainstream media” will be a thing of the past. It’s not news that the major US media are run by and for big business, or that the major media companies are themselves big businesses. Twenty years ago,...

Junk Science: Senate Democrats want TV networks to promote climate-change hysteria and follow the lead of Britain's state broadcasting company, which sent its top executives to a green propaganda training seminar. The mainstream media, long a house organ for Democrats, are about to come under pressure by Senate Democrats led by Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, who are gathering signatures from colleagues on a letter to the networks telling them they're ignoring global warming, according to a report in the National Journal. They are seeking to impose sort of a climate change "fairness doctrine" designed to ignore...

Fifty years ago today as President John F. Kennedy was in one side of the "Fish Room" of the White House with Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, his Karl Rove was plotting a dirty tricks operation to be used against conservative radio broadcasters in the 1964 presidential election. "Kenneth O'Donnell, the trusted friend and appointment secretary of President Kennedy, had never heard of Red Lion. In the autumn of 1963 the President's policies were being bombarded by a coast to coast battery of such right-wing radio commentators as the Reverends Carl McIntire and Billy James Hargis. Both were particuarly damaging to...

(The following is the third of three excerpts from The Right Frequency: The Story of the Talk Radio Giants Who Shook Up the Political and Media Establishment, by Fred Lucas; History Publishing Company. The adapted excerpt looks at the Fairness Doctrine.) The Democratic National Committee, with the approval of President Lyndon B. Johnson engaged in an effort that eventually led to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the Fairness Doctrine. What would have been a major scandal had it been discovered, was revealed years later in former CBS News president Fred Friendly’s book “The Good Guys, the Bad Guys and...

I am not shocked that the press is and always has been left leaning. I am shocked that they have thrown objectivity to the wind and are doing everything in their power to protect Obama. Atleast during the '04 election, they covered the Swift Boat Veterans, etc... It seems like they "learned their lesson" and are just ignoring anything they think will hurt Obama. I knew the attacks on Fox at the time were dangerous, but only now do we see how dangerous. If he was successful, Obama would have been able to control the message as he pushed for...

“I just don’t want to see something this significant – whatever the pros and cons – go through without anyone noticing,” “ says one source on the Hill, who is disturbed by the law. According to this source, the law would allow "U.S. propaganda intended to influence foreign audiences to be used on the domestic population." The new law would give sweeping powers to the State Department and Pentagon to push television, radio, newspaper, and social media onto the U.S. public. “It removes the protection for Americans,” says a Pentagon official who is concerned about the law. “It removes oversight...

The stated rationale for the Fairness Doctrine was to encourage more information to be aired by radio and TV stations, on the theory that private broadcasters would tend to underprovide a public good-news about important social issues. Yet, the danger has been seen, at the U.S. Supreme Court, the Federal Communications Commission, and elsewhere, that there exists a potentially unconstitutional "chilling effect": the prospect of having to award equal (unpaid) time to dissenting points of view institutes a tax on controversial speech. In that the Doctrine was abolished in 1987, the radio market now allows us to observe licensees' unregulated...

Actual title is : It’s baaack! The plan to kill talk radio. Group advising White House wants to restore controversial policy An organization that helped to craft President Obama’s environmental policies has recommended the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, purportedly as a method of silencing critics of the theory of global warming. The Presidential Climate Action Project, or PCAP, last year released an extensive list of recommendations for the White House in a 75-page paper entitled, “Building the Obama Administration’s Climate Legacy.” Primary among the PCAP’s recommendations is that the Department of Energy should join the U.S. Department of Housing...

When thinking of Newt Gingrich it is hard for me to get past that image of him sitting on the couch with Nancy Pelosi and talking about his belief in manmade global warming. He has since said that making that commercial was one of the stupidest things he has done in his life. So I suppose we could give him a pass on that one issue, but what about his opposition to the Paul Ryan budget? He called it right wing social engineering, was this a stupid mistake also? What about his previous support for healthcare mandates, TARP, the bailouts,...

The so-called Fairness Doctrine is the anti-First Amendment now unenforced Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rule which chilled free speech on the radio from its FCC creation in 1949 until the Commission voted to stop its enforcement in 1987. The Fairness in Broadcasting Act of 1987 (H.R. 1934) sprung up immediately after this latter vote to try to turn the Doctrine into law. Then Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich was one of its 71 co-sponsors. I can’t for the life of me find the final vote, so I do not know if Gingrich voted for it – though it would be a...

Newt Gingrich is a former history professor. After finding out that he co-sponsored the reintroduction of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, I think someone needs to make the point that you have to listen very closely to Newt Gingrich when he speaks. This video, in my view, offers a liberal view of the aftermath of abolishing the Fairness Doctrine. The monotonous narrator doesn't point out that if not for the nixing of the Fairness Doctrine, freedom in broadcasting could not be achieved. The major media, during the reign of the Fairness Doctrine, could and did spin the news toward liberalism....

The heads of China's largest Internet and technology firms have vowed to stop the "spread of harmful information" on the web after attending a three-day government workshop, state media said Sunday. Nearly 40 companies, including e-commerce giant Alibaba, online portal Sina and search engine Baidu attended the seminar hosted by the State Internet Information Office, an online watchdog, the official Xinhua news agency said. During the discussion, which ended Saturday, the bosses reached a "common agreement" to "safeguard" the spreading of positive information online and "strengthen self-management and self-discipline", the report said. They also agreed to "resolutely curb Internet rumours,...

The Federal Communications Commission may have killed off the controversial Fairness Doctrine this week, but conservatives -- offering faint praise for the move -- are sounding the alarm over what they see as backdoor attempts by the Obama administration to regulate political speech on the airwaves. They point to ownership diversity and "localism" as other ways Democrats can try to keep the spirit of the Fairness Doctrine alive and silence conservatives and Christian broadcasters.

"The FCC gave the coup de grace to the fairness doctrine Monday as the commission axed more than 80 media industry rules," Politico's Brooks Boliek reported this afternoon: Earlier this summer FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski agreed to erase the post WWII-era rule, but the action Monday puts the last nail into the coffin for the regulation that sought to ensure discussion over the airwaves of controversial issues did not exclude any particular point of view. A broadcaster that violated the rule risked losing its license. While the commission voted in 1987 to do away with the rule — a legacy...

FCC officially kills Fairness Doctrine, wiping it from rules By Gautham Nagesh - 08/22/11 03:21 PM ET Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski announced the elimination of 83 outdated and obsolete agency rules on Monday, including the controversial Fairness Doctrine. “The elimination of the obsolete Fairness Doctrine regulations will remove an unnecessary distraction. As I have said, striking this from our books ensures there can be no mistake that what has long been a dead letter remains dead," Genachowski said in a statement. "The Fairness Doctrine holds the potential to chill free speech and the free flow of ideas and...

Federal regulators will propose removing the “Fairness Doctrine,” a controversial, if little used, regulation on political speech from the books this week, the Federal Communications Commission said Monday. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski told lawmakers in June that the agency planned to dump the rule as part of a broader effort by the Obama administration to eliminate outdated and unneeded regulations. The agency’s media bureau said Monday that it will eliminate 83 rules including the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine, which has been around since 1949, required licensed broadcasters to give equal time to differing political views. The rule was introduced...

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski had promised to do that, as part of a clean-up of various unused rules at the agency. Both Genachowski and President Obama have been saying since 2009 that they were not in favor of reviving the policy about requiring stations to cover various sides of controversial issues. Republican lawmakers have asked the FCC to make that official, and today Broadcasting & Cable is reporting that the Fairness Doctrine, the personal attack rule and more than 80 other rules overseen by the Media Bureau have been removed from the rulebook. The Fairness Doctrine was shelved by the...

Though much of the discussion about a possible fairness doctrine for broadcasters went away when Republicans took over the House of Representatives in 2010, one Federal Communications Commissioner says there still could be an effort at finding a back door to the rules. Commissioner Robert McDowell told Chris Stirewalt on Monday's Power Play Live that localism, a proposal that gives the federal government the ability to make sure broadcasters serve their communities, could also be used to wedge in principles of the fairness doctrine.

See the story at The Lonely Conservative...

John Kerry has waded into the media waters and now wants the news to cut out conservatives he doesn’t agree with. During a discussion of the debt deal and the economy on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Friday, the current Massachusetts senator and former presidential candidate lambasted the Tea Party and conservatives and the idea that they should be given “equal time” in the media. According to him, their ideas are so whacky that they don’t deserve air time: “And I have to tell you, I say this to you politely. The media in America has a bigger responsibility than it’s...