An Alternate Route to Censorship

The Censorship Fairness Doctrine has been something near and dear to the hearts of the far left for a long time. With talk radio and the web being the main pillars of the center-right media landscape, effectively neutralizing conservative radio is a fantasy scenario for Bill Moyers and others like him.

That being said, it is becoming more likely that instead of going the congressional route to squelch conservative radio speech, the incoming Obama administration will try an alternate approach through regulatory bodies and the bureaucracy.

Conn Carroll explains:

Obama is too smart to bring back the 'Fairness Doctrine'. You are absolutely not going to see any movement in Congress to pass legislation forcing the FCC to revive the same rule it abandoned in 1987. But as the Center for American Progress points out, Congress does not need to pass any new legislation: "The public obligations inherent in the Fairness Doctrine are still in existence and operative, at least on paper."

Instead you will see a regulatory push at the FCC to intimidate conservative radio stations by shortening their licensing requirements from every eight, to every three years, and forcing them to meet stepped up "public interest" requirements. This new standard would be just as vague and ripe for abuse as the old Fairness Doctrine ever was. [...]

And the way Obama will porbably go about it, bypassing Congress and using a bureacratic out of touch regulatory body, is exactly the route the Obama administration is probably going to take on cap and trade as well.