Landrieu endorses govt censorship of political views

Lost last week in the continuing efforts to force from office Republican Sen. David Vitter, the Louisiana media have ignored the actions of Louisiana’s Democrat senator that threaten its very freedom.

Sen. Mary Landrieu along with every other Democrat senator save one, voted to prevent language that would bar the Federal Communications Commission from reinstituting the misnamed “Fairness Doctrine” applying to broadcasting. Two decades ago the rule lapsed as electronic media outlets began to proliferate. Originally, with just over-the-air sources of electronic media available, government wanted to ensure that the few broadcasting oligopolies (local and national) then existing could not force one viewpoint down people’s throats and so decreed controversial viewpoints broadcast by a station had to allow time for opposing views.

But the advent of cable and now satellite radio with Internet components to the media have more than mooted this concern. However, also in the interim, political opinion broadcasting mostly on radio has exploded – but to the great consternation of liberals like Landrieu, almost totally favoring the conservative side of the spectrum.

Understanding liberalism and conservatism explains the dominance of the latter easily. If you are well-informed about history and current events, you are a logical thinker, and you don’t let emotion cloud your arguments, only if you are intellectually dishonest with yourself can you think liberalism is a valid, coherent ideology. Because radio doesn’t have accompanying images that play much more to the basis of today’s liberalism, unreasoned emotion, it demands much more critical thinking on the part of its broadcasters and listeners when explicating ideas, accentuating the vastly superior quality of reasoning and fact presentation of conservatism.

Thus, talk radio has been the great equalizer to the liberal bent of other broadcast media. This makes liberals mad and explains the move to reopen the possibility of the rule’s promulgation in the future because they cannot stand the thought that, in the marketplace of ideas, conservatism trounces liberalism, endangering their political power. The idea would be, with the rule back in place to scare broadcasters away from presenting any opinion as conservatism resonates with the audience, to enable every single utterance to have liberal rebuttals that would cost so much time, money, and create such chaos that broadcasters would be discouraged from giving conservative arguments demanded by the public.

It won’t happen immediately give the alignment of political forces but it could in the future were liberals to get much healthier majorities in the U.S. government’s majoritarian branches. Thus moves were made to write into law a prohibition on the doctrine, which last month passed in the House.

The same was tried in the Senate attaching it to an unrelated bill. Perhaps the Democrat with the most to gain from this was Landrieu, whose seat is the most at peril among Democrats in 2008 and with a compliant print media in Louisiana, only talk radio has been able to present consistently to the public aspects about her record that demonstrate why she is a poor choice to represent the state. With her help, the amendment failed.

Make no mistake, Landrieu wants to use government to censor opinions she doesn’t like, to silence those who speak truth to power – itself another indicator of her unfitness for office.