From media bias to government censorship

Alan Nathan:

What chance do arguments have to rise and fall on their merits if they're framed by a seemingly party-owned press? And once that party comes to power, won't its lackey journalists constitute a type of state-owned press? In other words (after Inauguration Day), how can the blushing news media keep from sharing President-elect Barack Obama's political bed - given they have already serviced his electoral needs?

The news reporting world must recognize that responsible journalism requires universal standards of neutrality, and that this can only occur when facts are presented in their self-evident form. When they're not, the public naturally becomes more propagandized than informed. Punditry from all political perspectives is wonderfully helpful and perfectly legitimate - until it masquerades as news.

On Oct. 22, the Pew Foundation's Project for Excellence in Journalism illustrated that between the conventions and the debates, John McCain received double the negative reporting but only one-third of the positive when compared to Mr. Obama. On Nov. 9, Deborah Howell, ombudsman for The Washington Post, reported that when examining stories on the two vice presidential nominees, Republican Gov. Sarah Palin and Democratic Sen. Joe Biden, "Some readers thought The Post went over Palin with a fine-tooth comb and neglected Biden. They are right; it was a serious omission," Ms. Powell said.

Media bias has grown to such an extreme that only the more delusional ideologues still deny it. Fortunately, when they do this on radio, any degree of thoughtful point-counter-point debate quickly unravels their yarns of sophistry. However, even that fail-safe will be lost if talk radio's free-flowing conversation is quashed by yet another threatening bias called the Fairness Doctrine - aka, government-sponsored censorship.

Will a President Obama try to enforce the Fairness Doctrine, which is a Federal Communications Commission policy that once rigidly required radio stations to allocate time to both sides of every issue? Free speech had been chilled by this measure because stations were afraid to have political discourse that might be vulnerable to bad-faith charges of violation.

Democrats going back as far as the 1960s have capitalized on this fear. One of the most popular quotations on the subject came from Bill Ruder, President Kennedy's assistant secretary of commerce and co-founder of Ruder-Fin: "Our massive strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue."

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I think conservative talk radio will survive. It will either defeat the Democrats in the courts or it will move to the satellite channels and the internet, but it will survive. There is also another area of counterattack.

The statistics cited on media bias could be a basis for conservatives to challenge the broadcast networks coverage of conservative candidates and demand equal time from the networks in the 2012 election.

Those statistics can also buttress their argument that their own broadcast don't begin to compensate for the overall bias of other outlets. I think the court could very well consider an argument that put the fairness test to the media as a whole.