The Liberal Media Myth

As the news spread of the heinous and brutal attack on the Holocaust museum in Washington, onehopes that the Gentle Reader was deeply and sincerely offended. Simply stated, free speech mutated from the rantings of far-right cretins to a cancerous blight on libertarian discourse.

Deep condolences to the family of Stephen T. Johns are inadequate. The nation owes his family a proactive measure as means of beginning a memorial to a man who gave his life protecting a repository of evidence of what happens when extremism replaces sanity. Rounding up extremists and prosecuting them is compellingly attractive, but we are in the position of having to be the Good Guys.

Whatever we do, referring to the collective as those of good will and love for our system of constitutional jurisprudence, it must be informed by an unabiding adherence to the rule of law and the rights of the accused. No matter how distasteful we may find extremism, rounding 'em up and locking 'em down is just terribly George W. Bush-league. A better solution exists.

Repeal the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Get rid of it and salt the land from whence it came so that nothing ever grows there again. This law is an odious act of corporate welfare which has served to stifle dissenting opinion and deprive valid viewpoints of a platform for expression. The 1996 Telecommunications Act has provided fertile ground for breeding far right extremism of the kind which killed Officer Johns and devastated his family.

One station per band per market was the rule until a preliminary deregulatory law allowed companies to begin acquiring multiple stations in the same city. Free-to-air broadcast licenses being a finite commodity, limits were placed upon any entity consolidating large numbers of licenses. Prior to 1996, stations such as WIRY in Plattsburgh, New York, who focused upon the community they served were the rule.

WIRY is now the exception, as many broadcasters move to a business model of satellite-delivered programming. Author Stephen King refers to the most prolific type of music broadcaster as "Robo-oldies." While one is not inclined to focus upon the disgraceful state of oldies radio in America, the same model applies for news and opinion broadcasting: Robo-Republican.

The Robo-Republican nodel works thusly: acquire a potent signal in a medium to large market. Dismiss the news-gathering and local on-air talent. Replace the local talent with Fox News, Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin, Savage and Noory. Preemptively purchase any signal where a competitor may be established with the profits. Develop friendly professional relationships with entrenched local personalities like Neal Boortz and Mark Davis. Continue until able to throw loss-leader advertising rates against any program which appears to challenge satellite-delivered content. Eventually establish a monopoly upon audience.

Now is where things would most appropriately move in an anti-trust direction. The most egregious of all Robo-Republican megabroadcasters is Clear Channel. Clear Channel also owns Premiere Networks, which owns or distributes most of the content mentioned. While one does not suggest that Clear Channel directly specifies content, 900 signals, a lack of high-profile progressive voices, and the occasional leveraging of a Clear Channel board member (J.C. Watts) as a guest on Premiere Networks programming do indicate a definite agenda and conflict of interest.

The conflict is most easily ascertained when combined with the ability to direct dissent over to inferior signals or reformat entirely. It also helps to be able to elect an inferior rival, such as Air America, which sounded like it was produced on a dorm-room laptop.

The most compelling case for reregulation and anti-trust investigation of megabroadcasters does not lie in conservative rhetoric. As long as megabroadcasters are in a position to obstruct opposing viewpoints, a violent fringe of radical conservatives takes comfort in increasingly angry rubric. This rubric is couched in the idiom of inevitable subservience to a monolithic authority which would violently suppress all dissent. Listeners are encouraged to become active with the tacit subtext that conservative voices will only survive through the implicit threat of sustained violent rebellion.

Therefore, many sincere, decent conservatives been absorbed into the hateful thing that they themselves most fear. Right-wing broadcasters have tiptoed up to the line of inciting the overthrow of the United States Government. That one is pretty much a no-no in the Constitution. They put it right up there in the front. Aggression against a body which has committed no crime or has made no threat and justifying said aggression with fear is not the American way. It is the Nazi way. We are obligated by our constitution to be better than that.

It is time to take the microphone away from those whose acrimony and paranoia would deprive an innocent Stephen T. Johns of his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.