Are conservative blogs going to be silenced by the Democrats if they manage to re-impose the Fairness Doctrine?

There’s a huge concern among conservative talk radio hosts that reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine would all-but destroy the industry due to equal time constraints. But speech limits might not stop at radio. They could even be extended to include the Internet and “government dictating content policy.”

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell raised that as a possibility after talking with bloggers at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. McDowell spoke about a recent FCC vote to bar Comcast from engaging in certain Internet practices – expanding the federal agency’s oversight of Internet networks.

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“I think the fear is that somehow large corporations will censor their content, their points of view, right,” McDowell said. “I think the bigger concern for them should be if you have government dictating content policy, which by the way would have a big First Amendment problem.”

"Then, whoever is in charge of government is going to determine what is fair, under a so-called ‘Fairness Doctrine,’ which won’t be called that – it’ll be called something else,” McDowell said. “So, will Web sites, will bloggers have to give equal time or equal space on their Web site to opposing views rather than letting the marketplace of ideas determine that?”

The implications of this are startling -- will Blogger or WordPress have to monitor their websites to make sure that they have not become too political in one direction or the other -- especially if a politicized definition of "fairness" and "balance" is being enforced by liberal political censors regulators? Will individual web sites -- like this one, for example -- be forced to open themselves up to views not supported by their owners, thereby cutting into their available bandwidth? Will certain bloggers be forced to flee to offshore web hosts in order to exercise the rights theoretically guaranteed by the First Amendment -- or will the physical location of the blogger lead to regulation of content no matter where the server is located?

Scary stuff -- and one more reason to oppose both the so-called Fairness Doctrine and Barack Obama.

Posted by: Greg at 02:03 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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