One Small Ray Of Hope

Perhaps there is some hope for America after all.

After a slow start, the protests against the obama administration's tyrannical attempt to 'monitor' (read: manipulate) the news media gained enough significant mass to cause the regime to reconsider (at least partially).

As posted previously, barry's boys -- and girl -- at the FCC were poised to embed overseers in newsrooms across the country in a blatant attempt to intimidate media outlets that didn't parrot the party line. Tellingly, the media commissars were even to be present at newspapers, a medium over which the FCC has no legal or statutory authority.

However, enough of a fuss was raised to cause the FCC to back off - sort of.

The Federal Communications Commission has pulled the plug on its plan to conduct an intrusive probe of newsrooms as part of a “Critical Information Needs” survey of local media markets.

First Amendment supporters objected that the design of the survey would have had FCC representatives interrogating newsroom staffers about how they make coverage decisions and select (or spike) story ideas. Many commentators objected to the potential intimidation involved in such a survey.

The original plan of the survey would also have taken the FCC out of its traditional purview of regulating supposedly scarce airwaves. Because the CIN sought to discover “underserved” consumers in a variety of “media ecologies,” the survey would have included not only broadcast media but newspapers, blogs and online news.

That survey has been put on the back burner - for now. However, what remains is equally chilling.

The elimination of the newsroom probe raises the question of what form a future CIN survey may take...

One observer speculated to National Review that the FCC may take this opportunity to revisit a matter on which it has repeatedly been shot down. The airwaves regulator has been consistently blocked by courts in its efforts to establish race-based media ownership rules – on the grounds that it did not have data to justify such rulemaking. There is a movement to make the CIN a mechanism for gathering such data.

“Communities of color and women should have opportunities to control the distribution and creation of images about themselves,” the Conference wrote on December 5. “We look forward to working with the Chairman to consider the variety of technologies and policy initiatives that would accomplish that objective. We emphasized the importance of collecting data that tracks the impact of media consolidation on women and people of color ... and encouraged the Commission to move ahead with the effort, paying special attention to its ability to assess the needs of linguistic minorities.”

Oh my aching back. Between cable TV with 100s of channels, all sorts of radio outlets (satellite, Pandora, etc.), and the Internet, there have never in the history of mankind been as many or as diverse a selection of media. Women, people of color, and 'linguistic minorities' (whatever the hell that is) have never had so many options or outlets.

All of which has been achieved without government intervention...