Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, the RINO of RINOs who is a Republican when it suits him, is now an independent. The former Republican U.S. Senator is now the governor of Rhode Island and has prohibited all state employees from going on talk radio shows. Why? Here’s his addled reasoning:
Spokesman Michael Trainor said a directive will go out over the next day or so that reflects that new policy.
He said the policy emanates from a belief that talk radio is essentially “ratings-driven, for-profit programming,” and “we don’t think it is appropriate to use taxpayer resources” in the form of state employee work time to “support for-profit, ratings-driven programming.”
Does Chafee not understand that the liberal newspapers that he has kept on his list of approved media outlets are “for-profit” institutions? Has he never seen the ads in a newspaper, you know, those things down below the stories that pay the freight for all those lefty copy editors, pundits and reporters?
I had a boss once whose response when people accused him of “just trying to sell papers” was, “Hell, yes, I’m trying to sell papers. If I wasn’t, I’d be fired by my publisher.”
How is a newspaper’s profit motive different from talk radio’s? How is it different from the profit motive of news, non-talk radio, which Chafee has left on the approved media list? Are they any less “ratings driven” than talk radio? Hardly.
This is just another front in the war to demonize talk radio in advance of liberal attempts to Fairness Doctrine it out of existence. Like that effort, Chafee’s move is actually an attempt to shield himself from tough questions, scrutiny and accountability.
