Bring Back the Fairness Doctrine?

Is Murdoch Big Brother?

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

Fox News/New Hampshire Republican Party Forum has not invited Ron Paul to take part this Sunday.*  Paul's electability or significance as a candidate is not the issue.

 

On page 3 the December 31, 2007 edition of the hardcopy Wall Street Journal identified Paul as top contender on the Republican side. The WSJ is one of Rupert Murdoch's media holdings and investments, which also include Fox News Channel,  News Corporation (News Corp), Fox Network, MySpace.com, The Weekly Standard and numerous journals, broadcasters and cable companies throughout the world. 

 

Ron Paul's Revolution Problem by George Ajjan indicates that the WSJ probably underestimated Paul's electability.

 

Fox News has yet to explain itself.

 

watch video
Video Description
Story by Fox affiliate station KPTM in Omaha, NE. covering exclusion of Ron Paul from the Fox and New Hampshire GOP sponsored Republican Candidates Forum to be held on Jan. 6th in New Hampshire, and the onslaught of Ron Paul supporters expressing discontent for this blatant act of censorship.

 

Not only has Rupert Murdoch often put his investments in the service of his political agenda, but there is already evidence of Murdoch's violation of the laws governing media ownership (see The "Sale" of the Boston Herald ).** One may disagree with such laws, but until changed they should be enforced, and the conflict over the Roxbury Mosque demonstrated the value of laws that, if enforced, could make it difficult to misuse news reporting to persecute groups and individuals.

 

A core aspect of the conflict was the collusion between Fox Network and the Boston Herald in a probable criminal conspiracy to use fear-mongering defamation to deny the Boston Muslim community their federal First Amendment and state constitutional rights to unhindered religious worship and to free assembly. (See Singing HaTikvah while inciting a disastrous US invasion, The Boston Globe's Problem with Muslims, Open letter to the Boston Globe: A Lawsuit without Merit.)

 

Similar sorts of scare campaigns can be envisioned to deny American citizens their Second Amendment rights.

 

Unfortunately according to Wikipedia,

[in] August 1987, the FCC abolished the doctrine by a 4-0 vote, in the Syracuse Peace Council decision. The FCC stated, "the intrusion by government into the content of programming occasioned by the enforcement of [the Fairness Doctrine] restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters ... [and] actually inhibits the presentation of controversial issues of public importance to the detriment of the public and the degradation of the editorial prerogative of broadcast journalists," and suggested that, due to the many media voices in the marketplace, the doctrine be deemed unconstitutional.

The FCC eliminated the "personal attack" and "political editorial" rules in 2000.

 

The benefits of incorporation are not a natural or constitutional right, and in cases where the advantages of corporate organization are almost certainly being used in criminal conspiracy against rights and possibly in seditious conspiracy, the government has an obligation to intervene for the sake of the preservation of the American constitutional system.

 

I have been concerned about the issue of public access to information since 1984 when I first realized how Internet technology could change the newspaper industry for the worse if large content providers could effectively seize control of Internet bandwidth.

 

In 1991 I introduced VLAN Routing technology that made Quality of Service (QOS) charging infeasible and that has now become pervasive. In the current QOS free-for-all, the smallest Internet content providers can compete effectively with the largest, but the battle for control continues.

 

Despite the spread of such Internet technology, corporate consolidation in other media industries has provided unscrupulous operators like Murdoch with unprecedented opportunity to drown out critical or dissident voices like Ron Paul. The need to bring back the Fairness Doctrine is becoming ever more urgent, and the mere threat of its return might compel Murdoch and his many corporate organizations to behave.

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* See Concord Monitor - Some candidates won't make the cut and Winnowing the Debate Field - The Caucus - Politics - New York Times Blog.
** Note that the FCC eliminated the ban on newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership in a partisan 3-2 vote on Dec. 18, 2007. A bipartisan congressional coalition is attempting to overturn the FCC decision. See Media Ownership Act of 2007 Introduced in the House.

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