Right-wing talk show hosts tell us that efforts by Democrats and the Left to renew the Fairness Doctrine is just an attempt to silence conservative talk radio. Liberals are quick to poo poo this view. But I wonder if they’d believe an admission by several Democrats that this was exactly how the doctrine was used in the ’60s:
Bill Ruder, an Assistant Secretary of Commerce in the Kennedy years and an acknowledged leader in public relations, says frankly, “Our massive strategy [in the early 1960s] 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.”
This is from a book by Fred W. Friendly, who resigned the presidency of CBS in 1966 because they ran an “I Love Lucy” rerun instead of a Senate hearing questioning the country’s involvement in Vietnam, so no right-winger he.
So, when Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and the Clintons start harping about how the “Fairness” Doctrine is needed to “level the playing field,” remember Bill Ruder’s admission in Fred Friendly’s book. It’s not about fairness at all. It’s about squelching speech you don’t agree with, something liberals are supposed to abhor.
(h/t The Volokh Conspiracy)
