By David Limbaugh
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Any freedom-loving person would be outraged at the
attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to inject itself into
monitoring the practices of print and broadcast media organizations, but the
outrage came almost exclusively from conservatives, which is highly
instructive.
But liberals and conservatives are on such different
planets that they don't even agree that this development -- that only
conservatives objected -- is instructive, which is also instructive.
The Washington Post was hoist with its own petard in
reacting with a subtly pointed headline, "Proposed FCC study of news
organizations sparks conservative outcry," and exposing its own biases
rather than those of conservatives.
Simply put, everyone should object to this proposed
action, and the fact that only conservatives did shows they are the only ones
acting as freedom's guardians. That liberals didn't object is bad but is made
much worse by their opinion that conservatives' objection is itself
objectionable.
If blindly ideological liberals had a clue, they'd
understand that the primary reason conservatives object is not their fear that
certain media outlets will be exposed as unfairly conservative. Conservatives
strenuously oppose the proposed action because it is such a threat to our First
Amendment liberties, and any government that would even casually contemplate
such a move is one to be greatly feared -- and beaten back.
Of course, conservatives also fear that government
monitoring of media outlets would in fact lead to a disproportionate chilling
of conservative expression, which is inevitable when those doing the monitoring
are guaranteed to be liberals who delude themselves into believing that only
liberally minded people are capable of being objective. If you think that is an
exaggeration, listen to liberal hosts of the major networks assessing one
another as committed, objective journalists while decrying the bias of
conservatives. Their lack of self-awareness is stunning.
But even if conservatives are wrong about this, liberals
have nothing to fear from us on this issue anyway, because we are not the ones
proposing dangerous ideas to monitor, regulate and suppress speech. They are.
In the past 50 years, any serious encroachments on First Amendment political
and religious expression have come almost exclusively from the left -- from
campus speech codes to the Fairness Doctrine to Net neutrality.
Liberals are so intoxicated by their own biases that they
don't recognize how absurd it is that they apparently believe they have a
legitimate basis to be outraged at the ideological bias of conservative talk
radio and the alleged conservative bias of Fox News Channel.
The major news networks -- CBS, NBC and ABC -- had a
monopoly on television broadcast news for decades. They were almost exclusively
liberal -- a monolithic force in the gathering, dissemination and reporting of
network television news. When CNN came on the scene, it certainly didn't change
this liberal monopoly; we're talking Ted Turner -- Mr. Jane Fonda -- after all.
But with the advent of conservative talk, which was
self-admittedly ideological because it was opinion journalism as much as it was
news journalism, the liberal establishment went bonkers and cried foul.
Liberals invoked the regulatory power of the government through the Fairness
Doctrine in an attempt to emasculate this upstart medium because it was a
potential threat to their monopoly.
Think about it. Conservatives had no voice for a
half-century or more in television news and not much of one in the print media.
They complained but never sought to use government to muzzle the glorified
propagandists at the major networks. And these people had serious power. Go
back and examine Walter Cronkite's influence on the Vietnam War.
Conservatives didn't try to regulate the speech of
liberal news outlets, even when they had an unrivaled and unchallenged monopoly
and pretended to be purely objective news outlets while being infected with
bias at every stage of the news process. But at the first signs of a serious
conservative presence -- first with Rush Limbaugh's show and then with Fox News
Channel -- they screamed bloody murder, and they've been trying to muzzle it
ever since. The conservative blogosphere has just about sent them over the
edge.
The liberals' proper remedy to counter conservative talk
-- as if they needed to, given their continuing dominance on television news --
was to start their own liberal shows and compete in the marketplace of ideas.
Well, they did, and they failed repeatedly. Then they tried to get Big Brother
to re-impose the Fairness Doctrine to "hush Rush." They've also tried
and failed with the maniacally liberal MSNBC to unseat Fox News Channel as the
dominant cable network. Such is their frustration at having lost their
unchallenged monopoly that even the president of the United States himself
takes personal shots at this network -- as he does at conservative talk. What a
bunch of babies! What a bunch of bullies! What a bunch of Stalinists!
Of all the horrifyingly destructive things this
administration is doing to this country, nothing has scared me more in the past
five years than this chilling proposal to chill speech.
Liberals are getting more and more brazen in their
totalitarian propensities. We shouldn't let our guard down just because this
latest effort appears to have stalled. Liberals are patient, tireless and
relentless, and they'll try again when they think they can get away with it.
Keep your eyes wide-open!
No comments:
Post a Comment