Simels, that virtual Dictaphone cylinder of the common received Village Voice BS c. 1962 says of my writing, "Abolishing the Fairness Doctrine = crickets." Which is fully stupid because I've been writing against the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine under Ronald Reagan from before my first blog post mentioning it, by name, through writing for Echidne of the Snakes - see this post and many others at Echidne's blog with my name or my old pseudonym attached, and at this blog. I alluded to it and the other former broadcast requirements in several posts in the past few weeks, including this one, only Simps is too stupid to understand that's what was being talked about.
What is so funny about Stupy accusing me of ignoring that is that his favorite venue for misrepresenting what I write, Eschaton, is owned by a guy who is not so hot on the Fairness Doctrine or other requirements of responsibility placed on the electronic media. My reading his opposition to it was one of the first things that made me doubt the sincerity of his liberalism or whatever he calls it. Really, Duncan is a liberalish libertarian, I think if he kept writing, or started to again, eventually he would essentially turn into a Ripon Society type of guy. Only I think most of them probably thought that things like the Fairness Doctrine were necessary, suspecting that Herbert Hoover was right about the potential of the electronic media, radio, back then, to corrupt The People. It's about the only thing he was right about.
The Fairness Doctrine, necessary is it was and desireable as it still is, doesn't go nearly far enough. Lots of times there are not two true sides of an issue, there is one true side and lies and if you told the truth, under "Fairness" you would just have to let the liars tell their side of things. Of course that's the opposite of what happened when the Fairness Doctrine was killed by the Reagan administration, they told the lies and didn't broadcast the truth. "Fairness" doesn't apply to lies, there is nothing "fair" about broadcasting a lie, even if a large number of people believe the lie. The same was true of the old "equal-time" rule and other substitutes for making the most powerful, influential and profitable media serve the common interest in a democracy instead of attacking the common good for the profit of the owners, the advertisers and those with wealth and power, in general.
It turns out that the 18th century aristocrats who wrote the Bill of Rights were the actual neophytes they were and their document doesn't serve the needs of us, well more than two-hundred years later, their manual press thinking about media has been made quaintly irrelevant in the 21st century. Especially when you've got a number of sleaze ball lawyers, writers, publishers and media owners who have every interest in making the media into something more akin to what was envisioned by Orwell than what Jefferson so romantically presented it as being. The 18th century "enlightenment" was, in fact, an entirely romantic notion which not long after it became the preferred framing of the intellectual class proved itself to be entirely unrealistic when real people with real lives in real societies in the real world had to try to live with their silliness. Only, under our own silliness, promoted by the very media which is anything but enlightened, we are all supposed to pretend that the glaring inadequacies of it aren't there, even as they turn us into a country that could elect Donald Trump in a few weeks or, alternatively, could be under full automatic weapons attack from whatever fraction of his true believers he could encourage to start shooting. As I've mentioned before, they're already doing trial runs with the full throated approval of the unregulated media.
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