Left vs Right

[OpenMike]

Debating what's fair to air on talk radio
By ROB HOTAKAINEN
The Star’s Washington correspondent
WASHINGTON | When conservative radio helped bury an immigration bill, Sen. Trent Lott complained that “talk radio is running America.”

The Mississippi Republican suggested a remedy that immediately got talk show hosts talking. He suggested bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, which would force broadcasters to provide more political balance on the nation’s airwaves.

“It’s absurd,” said Mike Shanin, a self-described conservative host in Kansas City.

Lott, a conservative himself, got many of his Washington colleagues aroused as well.

Sen. Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, said any attempt to revive the Fairness Doctrine “ought to be dead on arrival.”

Another Republican, Rep. Connie Mack of Florida, even rolled out the specter of communism, calling it “a left-wing idea that only the likes of self-proclaimed communist Hugo Chavez could love.”

“Just as we’ve seen the systematic elimination of a free and independent media in Chavez’s Venezuela, some Democrats in Congress want to impose their own type of ‘check’ on our free and independent media in the United States,” Mack said.

Although no one has yet introduced legislation to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, the House, before leaving town for its Fourth of July break, passed an amendment to a federal spending bill that would block all funding for the doctrine. And separate bills were introduced in both the House and Senate that would prevent the Federal Communications Commission from reinstating it.

“Some Democrats may not like talk radio, but that does not give them the right to use the heavy hand of government to regulate it,” Kyl said.

“Unfortunately, talk radio is overwhelmingly one way,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, on “Fox News Sunday” last month.

“It also tends to be dwelling in hyperbole. It’s explosive. It pushes people to, I think, extreme views without a lot of information.”

On the Fairness Doctrine, she said she was “looking at it.”

Talk radio contains 10 times as much “conservative” talk as “progressive” talk, according to a study released last month by the Center for American Progress, a research and educational institute that works for “progressive and pragmatic solutions,” and Free Press, a group that focuses on media competitiveness.