User Submitted Blog Post: Does John McCain need the Fairness Doctrine?

I'm listening to Rush Limbaugh again these days. Limbaugh has been assuring his listeners that he is still not on the John McCain for President bandwagon just because he protested the New York Times' article on the Arizona Senator's relationship with a lobbyist. McCain's various collaborations with liberals are still unforgivable, Limbaugh insists.

"This is what you get when you walk across the aisle and try to make these people your friends," he explained. "Why should any of us be surprised or even angry at what the New York Times is doing here trying to take out John McCain?"

The nerve of the Times. After all, taking out McCain is Rush Limbaugh's job. Yesterday the talk show host outlined in painful detail McCain's troubles with the Federal Election Commission over a snafu that will either lock him into legal spending limits through July, or expose him as soliciting a loan without offering any public election money as collateral.

Is it only a matter of time before Limbaugh returns to falsely accusing McCain of having admitted that torture worked on the Senator during his five year ordeal in Vietnam? Or gleefully predicting that if Mike Huckabee wins any more victories, McCain will go "psycho?" . . . reduced to sitting "in a rocking chair wearing his mother's wig sitting above the Bates Hotel!" ?

Say, shouldn't the Republican contender be allowed to respond to all this at its source? Could it be that McCain needs the Fairness Doctrine?

Yes, I know this is heresy. Nobody supports the Federal Communications Commission's Fairness Doctrine any more. Certainly not conservatives, and rarely even liberals.

After all, Reasonable People know that during its tyrannical reign from 1949 through 1987, the Fairness Doctrine did terrible things. It required a Christian radio station to give a journalist rebuttal time after falsely calling him a Communist. The policy required television stations that broadcast cigarette advertisements to also run commentaries warning viewers that cigarettes, when used as instructed, could kill them. It allowed community leaders to challenge the license of a Mississippi TV station whose general manager blocked news stories even remotely sympathetic to integration, and in 1962 went on the air to denounce James Meredith, urging the governor to "keep that nigra out of Old Miss."

If these atrocities were not enough, broadcasters complain that the Fairness Doctrine cost them money. Back in the Dark Days, it either cost them money to put competing viewpoints on the air, or it cost them money to appeal a Fairness Doctrine complaint to the FCC. Apparently when these broadcasters purchased their radio or TV licenses, promising to serve the "interest, convenience, and necessity" of the public as per the Communications Act, they did not think that said pledge would cost them any money. It's good to know that innocence still prevails somewhere. To further protect these veritable babes in the woods, Ronald Reagan's FCC Chair Mark Fowler pledged to stop enforcing the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and it has been dead ever since, Thank God.

And so it is only unreasonable bloggers like myself who support the restoration of the Fairness Doctrine. It's just political perverts like me who think that when Rush Limbaugh—the Limbaugh who half-jokingly calls himself "Kingmaker of the Republican Party"—tells his listeners that McCain's nomination "will destroy the Republican Party," McCain should have a chance to respond on stations that broadcast said prediction.

But paradoxically, there's a man in the United States Senate who can be counted on to block my agenda dead in its tracks: John McCain.

Last June, not moments after the Republican Far Right triumphed over McCain's hated immigration reform law, former talk show host now Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, introduced a rider to a budgetary bill in the House that would forbid funding for the Federal Communications Commission to enforce the Fairness Doctrine. It overwhelmingly passed the House on Thursday June 26th. Even lots of Democrats voted for it.

Why then? Oklahoma Republican Senator and noted global warming denialist James Inhofe charged that he overheard California Senator Barbara Boxer and New York's Hillary Clinton plotting something against talk radio in a Capitol Hill elevator. Various statements sympathetic to the Fairness Doctrine made by John Kerry and Diane Feinstein were paraded out for all to see and dread.

But this was not enough, Reasonable People cried, including Rush Limbaugh, who calls the Fairness Doctrine the "hush Rush" rule. And so John McCain, desperate to get his Far Right creds back in order, threw his support behind the "Broadcaster Freedom Act." The proposed bill would go beyond Pence's largely symbolic one year budget rider. It would just by plain old Act of Congress prevent the FCC from enforcing the concept, once and for all.

How is it doing in the Senate eight months later? Well, the law has been introduced and cosponsored by 33 senators. But that's it; the bill hasn't even been scheduled for debate. And that makes sense, because its purpose was never to actually be enacted so much as to make the Ditto Heads happy. "I know most of my fellow conservative bloggers hate McCain," wrote one blogger at the time, "but anyone with 22 pets and who's against the 'Fairness Doctrine' can't be all that bad."

And so, thanks in large part to Senator John McCain of Arizona, radio is safe, safe from the obligation to let McCain respond over the Limbaugh network to Limbaugh's assertion that McCain "lied about his reason for opposing the Bush tax cuts." Limbaugh can continue saying anything he wants about McCain, me, or you, for that matter, without contradiction, save what we say on our blogs. And isn't that what a level playing field is all about.