NOVEMBER 25, 2008 --

LPR wonders that talkradiorators ought to get together to form a concerned conservatives club.

True, it might be said that the club already exists on a de facto basis. But perhaps an official association is needed for t'radiorators like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Bob Grant, Laura Ingraham, et al. to deal with the next huge national issue, now that a new president has been elected.

The issue, of course, is whether Washington’s Democrats will apply the “Fairness Doctrine” to force Rush, Sean, and the others off the air. And if they do try, the question becomes, will they succeed?

Indications are that the politically-slanted major media centers are ready to concede their bias towards the left. Howard Kurtz,the main mainstream media man at The Washington Post, suggested that boostering Candidate Obama had taken the media from reporting about politics into political mythmaking.

(Actually, pro-Democratic media boostering is not new; it was remarked upon by Theodore H. White in The Making iof the President 1960, p.338.)

Sally Quinn acknowledged the media slant chatting with Don Imus, November 20.
Ms. Quinn, (herself a journalist and wife of the legendary Benjamin C. Bradlee, Washington Post editor in the time of Watergate, now vice president at-large at the paper) also suggested that President-elect Obama would make a mistake in choosing Senator Hillary Cliinton be secretary of state.

Ms. Quinn noted that the Clintons would use every opportunity to stay in the limelight — even to grab it.. She also remarked that the Clinton crew is made up of people who are “vindictive,” among other things.

(Later on the Imus program, the I-man told Kinky Friedman that Senator Clinton led the campaign to get him off the air a year and a half ago. Friedman didn’t think so. Yet, if the Clintons and their coterie are vindictive, it could be more surprising that they did not participate in the anti-Imus campaign, given the I-man’s harsh comments of this former First Couple.)

The acknowledgment of media bias favoring Democrats would likely be cited by the concerned conservatives as the major reason the Fairness Doctrine should be left (no pun intended) on the shelf. They would contend that if they were forced off the air, our media would have all the political diversity of Pravda and Tass in Soviet Union days.

There is a distinction between airwave media and print media – a distinction supplied by the First Amendment which is understood to ban government licensing of print media but permits licensing of radio and TV stations.

And so, if the Fairness Doctrine were again applied to talkradio, it would also apply to MSNBC, CNN and so forth. And government would have the basis to establish a new bureaucracy: -- the Monitoring Media for Broadcast Bias Agency (MMBBA).

LPR expects that this issue will get lots of coverage this winter and spring – and perhaps beyond -- it perhaps being easier to report a political bias story (particularly if the news outlet shares the bias) than monitor government programs.

Accordingly, barring unforeseen developments, LPR will return to this issue in the weeks ahead.