[BC] Fairness doctrine by another name? aka censorship?

[Craig Bowman]

Donna,

I have great respect for you and your experience but if more stations in 
a market carried the "other" side, the revenue potentially would be 
split very thing.  So thin that the stations might have to drop them..  
If Ed does well against Sean, Bill, Gordon, etc. as the only alternative 
how will he do when there are three more alternatives.  Air America did 
not do well and we can debate why but at the end of the day it was not 
popular.  Talk is just a format after all.  If there are three country 
stations in a market and one Hit music station, more hit music stations 
will do nothing to help the existing one.  I once got in trouble on the 
air by opening up the phones about a controversial topic in a town where 
I did afternoons.  The station owner hit the ceiling because I had not 
gone out of my way to have the "other" side an opportunity to express 
their viewpoint.  I was not screening calls so the other side had an 
equal chance to get on the air but it made no difference.  At the time I 
thought it was a bit stifling (from a creativity standpoint) and I still 
do. 

I dare say that liberals have money too.  For the money they invested to 
get their president elected they could have purchased a pretty good 
sized radio group and molded minds for years to come.  I have done work 
for liberals who ran Limbaugh.  It is just economically smart.  I 
believe that Rupert Murdoch is liberal and he owns FOX news and the much 
more liberal Sky network in the UK.

I realize the public airwaves are a limited public resource and insomuch 
does not fully come under freedom of speech rights but at the same time 
limiting what an American can say just because he is on the radio seems 
a bit wrong.

Craig Bowman
Durand, MI
989-277-8835

Donna Halper wrote:
> Oh dear.  So much conservative bias, and so little time.  The 
> right-wing blog or newspaper this came from clearly has an agenda, and 
> telling the objective truth isn't part of that agenda evidently.  
> First, I am a member of MoveOn, and I am far from a "radical". And the 
> Center for American Progress is not exactly "liberal"-- it does have a 
> number of liberal members, but it also has some centrist and moderate 
> Republicans who do research for it.  And the CAP has not been pressing 
> for the Fairness Doctrine-- it did a very thorough study, quoted in 
> newspapers of all political persuasions, which showed that 90% of all 
> current talk shows are identifiably conservative.  And they discussed 
> some possible solutions to the lack of diversity on radio.  That's 
> what think-tanks do-- they issue papers and offer solutions to problems.
>
> Further, the myths about the Fairness Doctrine continue to swirl 
> around.  At the risk of shilling for my latest book, I can document 
> that under the Fairness Doctrine, FREE SPEECH WAS NOT STIFLED.  In 
> fact, rightie talk show hosts did just fine, and made lots of money.  
> Joe Pyne was alive and well and getting huge numbers under the 
> Fairness Doctrine.  Many stations had famous rightie talkers.  But 
> they also had some famous leftie talkers.  And nobody was censored.  
> This kind of inaccurate rhetoric, while making my rightie friends feel 
> good, does nothing to advance the discussion.
>