The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
NOTE: The excerpt below is from the 2/16/11 BOTW Archives:
Speech Copps
Here’s a troubling story from TheHill.com;
*Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps made a case for a government hand in media policy in a speech to the FCBA on Tuesday.
“The commission can act now. It should have acted on the media before now. I am disappointed that it has not,” he said.
The decline of “real journalism” justifies federal involvement, according to Copps. “The news is suffering from a bad case of substance abuse,” he said.
The Democratic commissioner pointed to Fox News’ Bernie Goldberg and Bill O’Reilly as examples of the problem with today’s media landscape, saying the pair has taken his own words out of context.
“What you and I are getting these days is too much opinion based on opinion and too little news based on fact,” Copps said.
Immediately you can see one problem. Whether or not his criticism of Goldberg and O’Reilly has merit–and on this, for lack of information, we have no opinion–he is singling out the network his party views as its adversary. If government were to assert the kind of control over news content that Copps desires, it would likely end up suiting the political purposes of whichever party is in power. From Copps’s standpoint, this may be a benefit, but when there is a Republican in the White House, he may suddenly discover that there is such a thing as the First Amendment.
*The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the U.S. government…with the majority of its commissioners appointed by the current President. The FCC was established by the Communications Act of 1934…and is charged with regulating all non-federal government use of the radio spectrum (including radio and television broadcasting), and all interstate telecommunications (wire, satellite and cable) as well as all international communications that originate or terminate in the United States.
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