Thread: Attack on talk radio begins

Attack on talk radio begins

By: Neal Boortz | Published on 06/21/07

This will be a big day for the left in its campaign to rid this country of their nemisis ... those pesky right-wing talk show hosts.

"This is going to be fun ... if not tragic."

Today we'll be hearing about a new study by the Center For American Progress, a Washington left-wing think tank. The man running this outfit is none other than John Podesta, the former Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton. This report will condemn what it calls a "massive imbalance" between conservative and "progressive" My guess is that the report will blame the preponderance of liberal talk radio shows on anything but the absolute failure of these shows to sustain themselves with good ratings. We'll also undoubtedly see the typical statements about the asinine concept of "the public's airwaves."

Now we all know that liberals -- and all-too-many conservatives, for that matter -- just love to use the police power of government to solve a private sector problem that vexes them. It's the liberal way. The liberal believes that this country is great because of its government, so why not use the government to make it even greater! At least in the eyes of the liberal elite.

Right now I would like to address this concept of the "public airwaves." Briefly put, it's utter nonsense. But where did it start? By the time radio broadcasting came along the elite -- that would be the political leadership -- understood the political value of controlling the flow of information to the people. A free flow of information was not desirable. The more exercise politicians could control over the dissemination of information, the stronger they were. And so it is today. You don't think that Hugo Chavez seized the nation's number one television station last month because he wanted to watch Sponge Fidel Square Pants, do you?

When our country was founded freedom was uppermost in the minds of our leaders. By the time Marconi got out his gun soldering gun and transmitted his first wireless signal around 1895 our Republic was already about 120 years old. By that time we had developed a political class that was perhaps more interested in preserving their positions of power than they were in preserving something so dangerous as freedom of the press.

Around ninety years earlier our nation's founders had decided that government should not interfere with the dissemination of information. Unfortunately, at that time there were only two ways to spread the word. One was verbally, the other was in written form. Both ended up being protected in the First Amendment to our Constitution. The First Amendment contained in the Bill of Rights was finally ratified on December 15, 1791. Can there be any doubt in your mind that had the authors of the Bill of Rights known of the role that broadcasting would one day play in conveying information, they would certainly have included broadcast freedom along with freedom of speech and the press? Certainly there is no good argument as to why they would not do so.

By the 1930s Marconi's little wireless telegraph invention was really taking hold, and our politicians started talking about government control. Now obviously there was a government role to play in protecting one broadcaster's right to the use of his broadcast frequency, just as there is a role for government to play in protecting your use of your own property. The government recognizes and affords you a means of protecting your property ownership rights. This is how it should have been with the government and broadcast frequencies. That wasn't the way it worked out. There was political power to protect.

Since there were no first amendment guarantees for freedom of broadcast, the politicians put their heads together to come up with some excuse to enable the government to step forward and take control ... FAST ... before this radio thing got to be a problem for them. After all, not only could information be shared with the American people through radio, but it could be done instantly, and at much lower cost than the printed media.

So ... what to do? Hey! Maybe this would work! We'll just say that the public owns the airwaves! And since the public owns the airwaves, we, as their loyal representatives in Washington, need to step forward and exercise control over what happens on those airwaves, just as we can manage access and behavior on any other government property!

I know most of you have never really thought about this before, but this argument is ridiculously easy to destroy. On just what basis does the public own the airwaves? Is there a purchase contract somewhere that I just haven't seen yet? Just when did the public acquire ownership of the airwaves? Did the public own the airwaves when there were no broadcast signals traveling at the speed of light from antennas to receivers? Or did that public ownership suddenly materialize when Marconi sent his first signal over the distance of about 14 feet? Maybe public ownership didn't happen until the KDKA broadcast some presidential election results in Pittsburgh on that night about 85 years ago. But, at whatever moment in time we're talking about, what even took place that suddenly granted ownership of all broadcast frequencies to the public? Did the public invest huge sums of money to develop these frequencies, or was this done by private entrepreneurs? Did the government go out and purchase or trade something for these frequencies as it did with the Louisiana purchase or Alaska? Just what happened? Where are the ownership papers? Where's the evidence that the public even had something to do with the very creation of these broadcast frequencies?

The answer is that there is no evidence of ownership. None. The public "owns the airwaves" only because the politicians in the early part of the last century said so. And that's it. They saw a new means of communication coming forward, a means of communication that had the promise of someday being more powerful than the Constitutionally protected printed word, and they wanted control. They wanted control, so they took it.

It would be easy to argue that government should control newspapers as it does broadcasting. Trust me, the left wing ideological tilt of the nation's newspapers is every bit as pronounced as is the conservative influence in talk radio. If it were not for the First Amendment, would these politicians be able to conjure up some sort of "public ownership" excuse to perhaps apply a fairness doctrine to newspapers? Well ... let's give it a try.

Let's see .... you can print a newspaper all you want, but it really doesn't do any good unless you get that newspaper to the people. You have to load those newspapers on to trucks and get them to the newsstands, the hotels, and to the people who deliver them to your front door. And guess what! To do this you have to use the public's roads! There! See how easy that was! We've created an excuse for government control of the content of your daily newspaper! All we had to do was show that the newspaper publishers use the public's roads and highways to get their news and opinion to your office or home!

It is so very much easier to make the case for public ownership of the roads and highways than it is to make the case for ownership of the airwaves. Unlike the broadcast frequencies, we actually paid for those highways through our tax money ... and we continue to pay for their maintenance year after year!

So .. why doesn't government step in with some control here? The answer is simple. The First Amendment. Government hands are tied when it comes to newspapers. Not so with talk radio, thus the left-wing study surfacing today.

Talk radio is conservative because that's what the listeners want. Don't give me this "corporate ownership" nonsense. WSB radio in Atlanta, my flagship station, is owned by Cox Radio, Inc. Cox Radio, in turn, is owned by Cox Enterprises which, in turned, is majority owned by people who have been stalwart Democrats since day one. In fact, Cox Enterprises was formed by James Cox, the Democrat candidate for president in the 1920 presidential election. (Defeated by Warren G. Harding) Interestingly enough, Cox's running mate was someone named Franklin D. Roosevelt. Does Cox Radio put me on their talk radio stations because I reflect the political ideology of the principals? Hardly. It's because I get ratings! And that means I make money for them. They've tried liberal hosts .... and they don't get ratings and they don't make money for the company. Simple as that.

So .. .the battle is joined. Liberals feel threatened by talk radio. They tried to succeed with their Air America, and all the George Soros and embezzled funds in the world didn't help them. So, in the liberal world, if at first you can't succeed, use the government to destroy your opponents.

This is going to be fun ... if not tragic. Let them get control in Washington and it will be the end of talk radio as we know it today.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/politics/b ... 070621.htm

check out the other article posted about this here;
http://www.alipac.us/modules.php?name=F ... ic&t=69797

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Group Led By Clinton’s John Podesta Outlines Assault of Conservative Radio
Posted by Noel Sheppard on June 21, 2007 - 13:52.
The supposedly “free speechâ€

Conservatives have the radio, Liberals have the internet. Last I checked more people get info from the internet than the radio now days. At least on the radio, opinions are not passed off as a "REAL source."

I say conservatives should make a formal compalint about Liberal websites that out number conservative talk radio 50 to 1.