Take The Broadcaster Freedom (To Monopolize Our Airwaves) Act Out Of The DC Voting Rights Bill
This really happened. Read carefully.Last month, Blog for Iowa reported on the GOP's most recent Rovesque trick play, code-named the “Broadcaster Freedom Act” (ha-ha). Such hilarity – it would be funny if it was satire, like on SNL or the Colbert Report. But it's really happening, and the stakes are too high for it to be at all humorous. The following is an action alert from ThePeaceTeam in response to the recent developments involving the GOP's clever ways.
~ A couple of weeks ago all of the monolith of right wing radio was literally hysterical about the possibility that the Fairness Doctrine might be brought back (see BFIA, Conservative Pundits Fear Return of the Fairness Doctrine). And then all of a sudden on Feb 26, 2009, with no other warning, a nauseatingly named, so-called “Broadcaster Freedom Act” was passed as an amendment to the DC voting rights bill in the Senate. [Yes, you read that correctly.]
We're of the opinion that the handful of hostile corporations who have such a death grip on our political speech right now don't need any more “freedom” to suppress even paid commercials they don't agree with, and to coordinate secret advertiser boycotts of the few progressive outlets in the so-called “free” market.
[Note from BFIA: Speaking of secret advertiser boycotts, if you live in Iowa City, you may remember in September of 2006, after successfully petitioning our local (Clear Channel-owned) radio station KXIC to add Air America Radio programming, KXIC began airing the Thom Hartmann and Randi Rhodes progressive talk shows. AAR was on the air for about a month, doing very well, and then suddenly and mysteriously vanished without a trace from the local airwaves. No one could get a straight answer out of KXIC or Clear Channel management, but this is what happened, as it turned out].
The only point of the Broadcaster Dictatorship provision is to make the current extreme wingnut bias of our media permanent, and to hold the DC voting rights provision for ransom to do it. The
reason why the right wing is so petrified about the return of real
fairness to our media is that it is only by perpetuating monopoly over
the major news sources that they can effectively exclude alternative
viewpoints from public debate.
Probably never before has such a hideously misleading provision been sneaked into a totally unrelated bill on such flimsy pretext. And had the ideological greedheads behind it not also pushed for adding the additional groaning baggage of an enshrinement of wild west gun ownership rights into the same bill, it might have already been passed into law. Please contact your members of Congress via this action page and tell them to make sure the Broadcaster Freedom to Monopolize Our Airwaves Act does not make it into law.
Blog For Iowa 