The idea that the Democrats are the party of free speech and the great protectors of our nation’s First Amendment heritage has always been a bit of a myth. In reality, when you study battles over freedom of speech and expression throughout American history you quickly come to realize that there are plenty of people in both parties would like to serve as the den mothers of the American citizenry. That being said, it is generally true that there have been a few more voices in the Democratic party willing to stand in opposition to governmental attempts to regulate speech in the past.
But I’m starting to wonder where even that handful of First Amendment champions has gone. Sadly, examples of Democrats selling out the First Amendment are becoming so common that I’ve decided to start a new series to highlight recent examples of Dems actually leading the charge for increased government regulation of speech and expression. I want to stress that I’m not trying to pick on Democrats here, rather, I’m just trying to point out that–unless there is a sea change in their approach to these issues by Democrats in coming months and years–both parties now appear to be singing out of the same pro-regulatory hymnal. This constitutes an ominous threat to the future of free expression.
Today, as part of this new series, I’ll be focusing on the Democratic-led efforts to revive the hideously misnamed “Fairness Doctrine.”
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Is Sam Brownback the answer for limited government types in the Republican party? He bills himself as a “full-scale Ronald Reagan conservative,” which implies a leave-us-alone attitude. Doing research at the FCC’s site today, I came across a press release (PDF) announcing the formation of something called The Task Force on “Media and Childhood Obesity: Today and Tomorrow.” Co-sponsor of the “task force” is Brownback.
The Task Force will produce a report that will recommend “voluntary” steps advertisers and broadcaster will be able to take to protect children from getting fat. Again, these suggestions will be completely voluntary, but the FCC just wanted to make sure to remind you on its obesity website that it has adopted children’s TV rules including “the requirement that television broadcasters, cable operators, and satellite providers protect children from excessive and inappropriate commercial messages,” and they can do so again.
Republican Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate is “elated” about the task force, but shows her conservative principles, saying (PDF), “Government cannot and should not be responsible for solving every societal problem; however, this affects not only our nation’s health but our budget as well.” Right.
“Given the saturation of media in our children’s lives, we need to understand how media impacts their health and behavior,” said Brownback. “Because parents have no control of how much media saturates their children’s lives, nor how it impacts their health,” he didn’t say, but he might as well have.
WASHINGTON, January 23, 2007–Those who would “Save the Internet” came to Memphis last week and declared victory in their struggle. They also hosted a party to celebrate and launch the next phase of the battle: going on the offensive.
The SavetheInternet.com Coalition is, of course, David to the Bell companies’ Goliath. Over the last two years AT&T, Verizon Communications and their trade group the United States Telecom Association spent more than $50 million lobbying Congress to change the nation’s telecommunications laws, according to disclosure documents. But it was spent in vain. The Bell-favored bill, which had overwhelmingly passed the House, died last year in the Senate.
In contrast, SavetheInternet.com spent $250,000 on educating the public about its side of the story, said coalition spokesman Craig Aaron. “Save the Internet” opposed the Bell bill, and made “Net Neutrality” its rallying cry. The coalition gathered more than 1.5 million petition signatures supporting the notion that telecom companies must be stopped from controlling the content that flows over their broadband networks
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Over at Techdirt, Carlo nails Dennis Kucinich’s proposal to bring back the so-called fairness doctrine:
One of the earliest lessons a lot of kids learn (though don’t necessarily accept) is that life isn’t fair, if for no other reason than what they think is fair is often wildly different than what their parents do. Now, once-failed and now long-shot presidential candidiate Dennis Kucinich says he’ll be heading up a new House subcommittee on issues around the FCC, that he might try to bring back the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine was an FCC rule, in force until 1987, that said broadcasters had a responsibility to discuss controversial issues of public importance, and to do so in a balanced manner that addressed differing points of view. While the goal of the doctrine might sound nice, the rule itself is a little troublesome, not least of which because it could be interpreted as violating the First Amendment (though the current FCC isn’t likely to care about that), but also because it holds broadcasters to a wholly subjective ideal. Who decides what’s fair? After all, one popular news network famously uses the tagline “fair and balanced”, when plenty of people feel it’s neither. The Fairness Doctrine also makes less and less sense in an age where the number of media outlets is proliferating. There’s no limit to the number of places that can provide news or opinion, and professionals and the public have more tools than ever at their disposal to tell their own stories and express their own viewpoints. To require certain media to provide an arbitrary level of “balance” makes less sense than encouraging people with disagreeing viewpoints to develop their own media outlets, whether it’s a blog, newsletter or even a cable TV channel. Kucinich says that “the media has become the servant of a very narrow corporate agenda”–but reinstituting the Fairness Doctrine would simply replace that corporate agenda with that of a political appointee, and that’s really not very fair.
It’s truly mind-boggling that someone could look at today’s media landscape, which is by almost any measure more diverse, vibrant, and competitive than at any point in the history of the world, and conclude that we need to turn back the clock to the 1970s, when a government bureaucrat sat in judgment of the “fairness” of each television outlet’s news and commentary.
It’s particularly irritating to see it come from the political left because if there’s one that the Bush administration has taught us about journalistic objectivity, it’s that a White House that’s willing to twist the truth can use the concept of “fairness” to browbeat journalists into putting its obfuscations on an equal footing with more credible observers. This just isn’t the sort of problem that a bureaucracy like the FCC can solve. It can only be solved by journalists who are willing to call a spade a spade, and opposition politicians who are willing to highlight their opponents’ dishonesty. Putting the FCC in charge of determining what’s “fair” is not only an affront to the First Amendment, but it’s not likely to work either.
MEMPHIS, Tenn., January 13, 2007–A new House subcommittee chaired by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, will turn its oversight to a range of government agencies, particularly the Federal Communications Commission, Kucinich announced here on Friday night.
Kucinich, a 2004 candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination who stated his intention to run again in 2008, said that his committee will hold holdings criticizing the FCC on the issue of media ownership.
In a speech before the National Conference for Media Reform here, unexpected visitor Kucinich announced his chairmanship of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the House Government Reform Committee.
The new subcommittee, Kucinich said in the speech, would be a platform to hold “hearings to push media reform right at the center of Washington.”
“You are the message,” he said to the cheering crowd.
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I spent most of the day yesterday at CES covering video game panel discussions. Today, I attended several panel discussions on the future of video distribution over TV, cable, satellite, the Web and mobile devices. Two of these panels were entitled “Television 2.0: As Cable, Telco, Satellite, OnDemand and Broadband Redefine the Future of Entertainment & Communications” and “Embracing the Connected Consumer: Entertainment, Content and Technology–From Home to the Mobile and Wi-Fi Universe.” Later I attended a panel featuring TV industry heavyweights from DirecTV, EchoStar, Time Warner, Hearst-Argyle and Cox Communications. Here are some highlights from those discussions:
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WASHINGTON, January 8, 2007–Both the high-tech and the mainstream press go ga-ga over the Consumer Electronics Show. Forty years old, it’s the country’s largest annual trade show, and it officially opens this morning in Las Vegas.
What’s not to like in more than 1.2 million square feet of electronic glitz and glimmer? On Sunday night, Microsoft’s Bill Gates previewed how your car will communicate with your electronic address book and your digital music player. Verizon Wireless demonstrated how you will soon get television from Comedy Central, Fox, and NBC directly on your cell phone. And NetGear announced a “media receiver” for watching TV, movies and Internet videos from the comfort of your leather couch. Think of it as video iPod with an HDTV connection.
The impresario of all these digital goodies is Gary Shapiro, the chief lobbyist for the Consumer Electronics Association. CEA is the tech trade association that sponsors the annual event, raking in more than $80 million. But for Shapiro, who looks and acts like the proverbial kid in the candy shop for four days every January, the show is about more than just money. It’s about scoring points for his group’s public policy agenda in Washington.
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This week I’m out in Las Vegas covering the grand-daddy of all industry trade shows–the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). It’s an amazing spectacle to behold and it’s impossible to even begin to summarize all the great gadgets I’m seeing and issue panels that I’m covering. But over the next few days I’ll try to share a few highlights.
Although things really don’t get into full swing until Monday morning of the event, Sunday featured several panel discussions about the future of the gaming industry. Faithful readers will recall my love of video games and my many columns on gaming issues.
I attended 5 different panel discussions. The first two proved the most interesting to me. They were entitled “Broadband Games Expand: From Casual to the Networked PC Universe” and “Entertainment as Franchise: Games Cross over into Music, TV, Cable, Movies, Mobile, Advertainment & Custom Branded Experience.” The other panels were on massive, multiplayer online games, mobile gaming, and cross-platform branding / advertsing. Here are few highlights:
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My former Cato Institute colleague and frequent co-author Wayne Crews suggests in an editorial today the time may be right for a “Declaration of Independence for virtual games.” Crews, who is currently vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, argues that:
“Can political regulation be avoided? ‘Second Life’ is a grand experiment: Those appreciative of today’s numerous revolutions in communications, of which ‘Second Life’ is one striking example, have a stake in keeping voluntary, private networks like ‘Second Life’ as unregulated as possible, or at the very least, relying on existing law that obviates the need for harmful regulatory adventurism.”
This is something I’ve wondered about myself in various essays here. It’s been ten years since John Perry Barlow penned his famous “Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace.” Maybe it’s time for someone take a shot at one for the virtual reality world. So, who wants be the Thomas Jefferson of virtual reality?!
HONG KONG, December 5, 2006–The convergence of telecommunications and media is posing problem for communications regulators all over the world, and many of them swapped stories here about the best way to cope with rapid technological change.
Most government panelists participating in two morning sessions at the International Telecommunications Union’s Telecom World conference here agreed on the need for a unified communications authority.
But they differed after whether competition policy could prove adequate to dealing with issues of telecommunications and media. In other words, would the need for communications regulation fade over time?
Officials from France and Hong Kong are both in the midst of re-evaluating their existing regulatory structures, which include two separate agencies. In each case, one agency is charged with overseeing broadcasting, and the other agency oversees telephone communications.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.