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Nancy Pelosi vs. the Internet
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Jul 09, 2008 01:00 PM
from the but-nancy-pelosi-was-in-the-other-room dept.
from the but-nancy-pelosi-was-in-the-other-room dept.
selil writes "A story popped up on the ChicagoBoyz Blog. It says 'Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who would like very much to reimpose the old, so-called, "Fairness Doctrine" that once censored conservative opinion on television and radio broadcasting, is scheming to impose rules barring any member of Congress from posting opinions on any internet site without first obtaining prior approval from the Democratic leadership of Congress. No blogs, twitter, online forums — nothing.'"
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The democratic party in a nutshell: (Score:5, Insightful)
"We know what's best for you"
Fraud Alert: Slashvertisement? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, if you read the PDF of the letter mentioned, it is about technical limitations of U.S. government support for internet access. The rules proposed seem very sensible. The letter says NOTHING about Nancy Pelosi.
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Re:Fraud Alert: Slashvertisement? (Score:5, Insightful)
Misleading title, incorrect description and bogus article. I must admit that this type of thing happens less frequently in my estimation. Back when it was happening constantly i would not even come here anymore (so I discovered Digg and then Reddit).
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Not far enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Since the letter doesn't mention the fairness doctrine, I wouldn't tilt at that windmill if I were you.
The first part is true, the second part is not. Or at least the second part grants the unsubstained allegation that the recommendations are that evil. The letter reads, to paraphrase:
Nothing about unoffical postings is being mentioned (a member's twitter account, for instance.) And it seeks to expand, not limit, options.
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Re:Fraud Alert: Slashvertisement? (Score:5, Interesting)
And here comes another another semiliterate. The same damn article you point me to explains that the Fairness Doctrine was created to target communism. Hmmmm...tell me again that it was created to target conservative viewpoints.
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Re:Fraud Alert: Slashvertisement? (Score:5, Insightful)
It wasn't created to target Conservatives, however what the purpose of reviving it appears to be geared towards targeting Conservative talk radio.
Walk with me, if you will. You can get both Conservative and Liberal leaning news from websites, television and newspapers. However, the same cannot be said about radio. It is dominated by Conservative talk radio, and the only Liberal talk radio has survived essentially subsidized by the government.
Any medium of news is subsidized through ad revenue, and ad revenue is based upon the ratings of the shows during which they air. Rush Limbaugh along generates a constant 13.6 million listeners during the course of his 3 hours show. On the other hand, the best ratings I've found for Air America is 1.5 million unique listens over a week. Air America just doesn't generate enough ad revenue to keep it in enough markets, proof being that they had to file for bankruptcy.
Now how does all of this and the fairness doctrine show an attempt to censor conservative talk radio?
Ratings show that liberal talk radio just cannot compete against conservative talk radio. It doesn't get carried, or it gets dismally low ratings. Radio stations that carried shows like Rush's would be required to carry liberal shows (or at least the liberals mentioned) for the same amount of time. Mind you, the Fairness Doctrine applies to stations, not the individuals that produce the shows the stations carry.
Now with the fairness doctrine, a station would almost certainly be forced to carry 3 hours of Air America for every 3 hours of Rush's show in order to make close to the balance required by the act. You won't get Rush letting liberals on his show to defend themselves against his points, so the stations need to adapt as best they can. Here's where the problem comes, since the liberal shows will not draw as much revenue as the conservative ones, it may cost the station enough revenue that they wouldn't be able to operate in the black. Since they're hijacked by the law to reduce their revenue, they either go out of business, or get non-controversial programing that allows them to operate in the black.
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Re:Fraud Alert: Slashvertisement? (Score:5, Interesting)
Who decides? So I'm a radio station. Throughout the day I have different hosts with different opinions, however none of them approve of Pres. Bush. So now I have to go find someone who does? How many hosts must I find so that every viewpoint on every controversial issue gets airtime?
It is censorship. If I want to stand on my soapbox all day long and the government says I can only do so from noon to 6, that's censorship.
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Re:The democratic party in a nutshell: (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you for that; depending on how many states the Greens are on the ballot in, I'll vote for them or alternately Bob Barr, the fake Libertarian. From TFB:
What a load of horse shit. If the "liberals" said domething they had to counter it with a "conservative" stance. Apparently the submitter thinks it's OK to censor Dems but not Repubs. Actually it's the other three parties that are being censored; so much that I bet few of you even know who their candidates are.
And the conrporate media wants to keep it that way so the corporations only have two candidates to bribe.
The only thing the "liberals" want to be liberal with is my money, and the only thing the conservatives want to conserve is their own.
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Re:The democratic party in a nutshell: (Score:5, Interesting)
Oooh, I know: Mr. Unelectable#1, Mr. Unelectable#2, and Mr. Unelectable#3!
Has it ever occurred to anyone else, that the "third" parties are a ploy by the two big parties to siphon-off people who demand change, into irrelevancy, so that the big-two aren't forced to change at all to accommodate these 'extremists'?
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Re:The democratic party in a nutshell: (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are talking about the *reaction* of the two major parties to third parties, yes, they do feel as if the third parties are illegitimate and "stealing votes."
If you think that the third parties are actually created by the two major parties as a diversion, then I think your tinfoil hat is a little too tight...
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Re:The democratic party in a nutshell: (Score:5, Informative)
While I agree with your general point about the marginalization of third parties, I think this statement of yours is based on an insufficient understanding of the history of the Fairness Doctrine:
What a load of horse shit. If the "liberals" said domething they had to counter it with a "conservative" stance. Apparently the submitter thinks it's OK to censor Dems but not Repubs
What led to the submitter summary was this: Basically, virtually all talk show hosts capable of garnering an audience were conservative. So if a radio station wanted to have one of these guys, they'd have to have a liberal respond. At risk of sounding trollish (but this is just the history) the liberal response would be boring and lose listeners.
Again, I'm not trying to troll: the fact that conservatives had more mass appeal on radio could just as well be due to their oversimplification of the issues.
The upshot is, because radio shows couldn't justify the loss of listeners through the liberal response, via the gain through the conservative talk show hosts, the result of the Fairness Doctrine was much more detrimental to conservatives.
So yes, in theory it applies equally, but as the saying goes, "The law forbids the rich from sleeping under bridges, just the same as it does the poor."
See: any history of the Fairness Doctrine.
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Re:The democratic party in a nutshell: (Score:5, Funny)
The Democratic and Republican parties are two sides of the same coin.
More like two cheeks of the same horses ass.
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Re:The democratic party in a nutshell: (Score:5, Funny)
That stuff coming out from between must be compromise legislation.
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Re:The democratic party in a nutshell: (Score:5, Funny)
but every time I hear about something like this I get the same creepy feeling I get when I saw that commercial with George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton side by side. That could just be because I was being looked at by a sleazeball and a cold-blooded killer, though.
And how do you describe George Bush Sr.? ;-)
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Re:The democratic party in a nutshell: (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems to me that the growing consensus is that neither party serves the interests of the average American, possibly due to the variety of information available on the internet, along with the more blatant corporatist leaning from the democrats we've seen over the last decade.
Seems that the time is right for a 3rd party to step up to the plate, but it would require a really charismatic candidate to pull it off.
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Re:The democratic party in a nutshell: (Score:5, Insightful)
It's mathematics, really: given our current plurality voting method, if there were ever more than two options with a snowball's chance in hell, then coalitions would form until there were, again, only two options. (Your only escape: ranked voting methods such as Condorcet. But why would any two-party member support that sort of change?)
The players may change (we did lose the Whigs), but it takes a serious, serious shake-up, and settles back down to one-on-one very, very quickly.
And consider this: do you know who runs the pressidential debates? If you said "The League of Women Voters," you're wrong. They used too, but since that old Ross Perot nonsense almost worked, those are organized by a joint project between the Democratic and Republican parties. So good luck getting any third party candidate recognition. Sure, there are other venues: but every single one has these same kind of roadblocks errected by the current duopoly of parites.
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Re:Nancy Pelosi is VERY weak (Score:5, Funny)
Morally, and in the upper arms.
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The Hen or The Egg (Score:5, Interesting)
Does politics bring in the idiots from the streets, or does politics create idiots from sane stock? Discuss!
Re:The Hen or The Egg (Score:5, Funny)
Discuss!
Without prior consent? I think not!
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Re:The Hen or The Egg (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of these ground rules are
The hyperbole by the obviously conservative-leaning original poster and the TFA is ridiculous and is just a prime example of alarmist propaganda, trying to blow this WAY out of proportion.
It's simply a proposal for ground rules as the committee examines extending the ability of members of congress to post "official" content outside of existing official channels. Rather than being a "clamp down", it's actually broadening the number of venues members of congress can use for posting "official" congressional communications, but tries to ensure that there will be some level of decorum and good taste.
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Re:The Hen or The Egg (Score:5, Funny)
content that will harm or impugn the dignity of the congress.
See, you had me going there for a minute...
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Re:The Hen or The Egg (Score:5, Insightful)
impugn the dignity of the congress.
Do you know what to impugn [reference.com] means, or why prohibiting it is an infringement on free speech?
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Re:The Hen or The Egg (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't that a congress critter can't do something the "impugn the dignity of congress" they just can't do it and stamp it as an "official" congressional document. It simply is not an official opinion of the congress, but rather that of the individual.
They're still perfectly welcome to post whatever bile they want on airportbathroomstalltoetappers.com, or whatever website they wish. This isn't terribly unique either, I can't go around posting whatever crap I want for the company I work for and label it an official company position. I can still say whatever I want, I just can't pretend that I'm somehow representing my company while doing it, and similarly a member of congress, working for Congress and our government as a whole can't state things and represent it as the official position of Congress and our government arbitrarily either.
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Re:The Hen or The Egg (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:The Hen or The Egg (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll counter with Grey's law: "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
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Not "idiots". (Score:5, Insightful)
They just have very specialized knowledge. The knowledge of how to get themselves elected, keep getting re-elected and moving up the chain of authority.
All of that schmoozing and such does not leave much time for learning anything else.
So they rely upon "advisors" for their "information". And said "information" has to be communicated to them in the least technical terms. Which results in statements about "tubes" and "trucks".
But to be fair to them, my CFO asked a little while ago if the power problems we had were a result of her sending an email to Iceland. After all, it must take a lot more power to push the message that far than to push it across the street.
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Direct link to the letter in question (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Direct link to the letter in question (Score:5, Insightful)
How dare you? If you post the real document people might read it! And see that this - analysis? - is a crock of horseshit.
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Re:Direct link to the letter in question (Score:5, Interesting)
Forgot to mention - any IT guys looking for work in the Washington, DC area should write to Mr. Capuano and tell him you know how to set up a video server. Seems this all started because the House has lousy IT.
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Seems fairly benign (Score:5, Insightful)
It's actually more permissive than our Internet posting policies here at work. Right now, you have to work through us (the web services team), as opposted to setting up your own URL and posting whatever you want outside of the official content.
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This must be reliable (Score:5, Insightful)
So, Submitter says that the right-wing Chicagoboyz blog says that Congressman Culberson says that Congrassman Brady says that Congressman Capuano says that Majority Leader Pelosi says she wants to stifle free spech?
EVERYBODY PANIC!
Re:This must be reliable (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, and the blog post links to the document itself, which says that they're talking about ways to disseminate the exact same information that they publish now using outside hosting services, that everybody's behind the idea, they have some common-sense guidelines for hosting the content, and there's at least one site they can give the green light to right now. They're looking to make sure that when you look at official content of the House of Representatives, you know you are, when you're not anymore, you know you're not anymore. Now, the one possible sticking point:
In light of the context of the letter, that's basically saying if you couldn't put it on the House website, you can't have it hosted next to content that you couldn't post on the House website. You can't have it looking like the House of Representatives is trying to sell you (crap - I've had like three web ads in four years escape my filters, what do they try to sell you these day? car wax, let's say car wax) car wax or wants you to click on a link to Food Not Bombs or your local "militia" after you listen to what they have to say. Even if this is the most draconian fascist nightmare you can imagine (if it is, go to your library, ask where the history section is, and grab three books at random) nobody's "scheming to impose rules". From the letter:
Maybe Robert Brady was aware, but somebody needs to tell zenpundit and selil, and if John Culberson actually wasn't that fucking stupid, he should be ticked off at the words that have been put in his mouth. What they're out to do is go shopping for places where Representatives can post the media they want to, and give them a handy list of places they can post away without having to worry about their disk quota. I don't see how trying to find a content-neutral platform for offsite hosting of exactly the content disseminated now is "censorship", "nakedly partisan", or a move to "reimpose the 'Fairness Doctrine'".
Seriously, if I want to be roped into reading an article with a bunch of total fucking bullshit hype that any fifth grader can see through once they sit down and read the damn thing, I'll go to the checkout line at the drug store. Nice one, Timothy.
Yes, everybody panic. We were all sadly mistaken when we thought we'd seen the worst out of the editors here.
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Not anything like what the abstract says (Score:5, Informative)
This is a regulation of HOUSE MEMBERS usage of the Internet - not the general public. Look at the linked letter: http://gopleader.gov/UploadedFiles/Capuano_letter.PDF [gopleader.gov]
The AS ASS above thinks that the Dems are manipulating the general public's right to free political speech, he is dead wrong.
The limits are to be placed upon Members of Congress and their staff and merely require that the material is vetted (I approved this ....) and that limitation of the staff's right to engage in political speech is included, too (it already is restricted - See, the Hatch Act, http://www.osc.gov/hatchact.htm [osc.gov] ). RTFA.
Total Crap (Score:5, Informative)
From the PDF of the letter in question:
"Please note that nothing in these recommendations should b e construed as a recommendation to change the current House rules and regulations governing the content of official communications."
This is an attempt to deal with technical issues and update existing House rules to keep up with technology. There's a lot of FUD in the article summary and in TFA.
Anyone read the actual sources? (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the actual letter they reference: http://gopleader.gov/UploadedFiles/Capuano_letter.PDF [gopleader.gov]
I'm sorry, but I don't understand how they can draw those conclusions from the source they reference. And I don't see anything about Pelosi. The letter seems to say that people can post stuff on outside servers, provided there is a way of verifying it really came from who it says its from. Whoah! Scandal!
Why is Slashdot posting links to crazy right wing/libertartian conspiracy theories? This is stupid.
Re:Anyone read the actual sources? (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess to some people, anything left of Reagan is left wing. I've never had the impression Slashdot was in any way left wing. Slashdot is and always has been centrist/libertarian. Try mentioning that the government should raise taxes to cover more social programs and see how fast you get modded into oblivion. Or try saying we should seize the property of the rich and nationalize it. Left wing/communist my ass.
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Summary Over the Top and Dead Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
I've read the PDF about the *suggested* changes.
Currently there are rules governing the posting of *official* House of Reps material which includes the requirement that such posts are done in the house.gov domain.
The suggested change allows that material to be hosted on external servers subject to the *existing rules*.
It says *nothing* about prohibiting posting of opinions by house members on any web site. Nothing.
(-1, Troll) (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the letter linked as "evidence" of this "censorship" policy:
http://gopleader.gov/UploadedFiles/Capuano_letter.PDF [gopleader.gov].
Seems to me that it's referring to "official" House media... that is, representative of The House. Makes sense that if something's supposed to represent the body it ought to be approved by the majority, Democratic, Republican, or whoever.
Any other sources that indicate that congress is being gagged in their personal speech?
Re:(-1, Troll) (Score:5, Insightful)
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Please Read the Letter! (Score:5, Informative)
The letter is avialable here [gopleader.gov]
#1 - This is only concerning official House communications...not informal messages from House members.
#2 - The letter is actually requesting to open up external sites (like Youtube) for official House communications since the current house.gov website doesn't meet the needs.
#3 - The restrictions requested ask for similar standing on external sites as they have on house.gov. In other words, offical communication can't be posted along side an Obama banner ad.
So? how quickly we forget... (Score:5, Informative)
Remember Al & Tipper Gore's charge against "bad lyrics" in 1985?
Remember Al Gore and his running mate, Senator Joseph Lieberman, threat to impose forms of state censorship on the film, music and video games industries should they win the November election in 2000?
Remember Senator John D. Rockefeller's (D-W.Va) "Indecent and Gratuitous and Excessively Violent Programming Control Act." of 2005?
Remember Hilary Clinton taking a public stand [slashdot.org] in favor of shielding children from game and other animation content that she deems inappropriate in 2007?
The republicans arent the only ones taking away your rights...
The Fairness Doctrine and its relevance (Score:5, Insightful)
The crack about the Fairness Doctrine is particularly illuminating because it is so ignorant.
The Fairness Doctrine [wikipedia.org]. was a pre-internet rule supported by both Conservatives and Liberals, used because the government was controlling who could broadcast television and radio.
Since broadcast mass media "speech" was already totally controlled ("non-free") on the airwaves via the FCC (though for reasons of technology rather than politics), the lucky (and very wealthy) few who had been granted the privilege to broadcast were required to provide time to both sides of any controversial issue. This rule was administered by the FCC, who still performs the same function today with regards to moral standards, language, etc... pretty much everything but politics, where they were instructed by Reagan and Bush (sr. and jr.) to stop (and not yet forced by congress to resume, despite several failed attempts).
The Fairness Doctrine is as irrelevant on the Internet as it is to a newspaper or a public park, since there is no meaningful barrier for anyone to "speak" in these venues.
It will not be thus forever, but today in 2008, TV and radio still have a substantial audience and influence (as evidenced by gross advertising revenues), and it is still only an exclusive, government controlled elite club who can broadcast on these systems. Repealing the Fairness Doctrine essentially allowed the broadcasters as a whole to skew farther to one side of the ideological spectrum or the other legally (where before it would have been very difficult to go too far and stay within the law). Those with wealth and power (and that changes in cycles) can thus use the broadcast media for propaganda purposes, a concept familiar in places like Russia, Italy, etc. and now increasingly familiar here in the USA.
As Rupert Murdoch is now considerably warm towards Barack Obama (see the WSJ [wsj.com]), I wonder if Conservatives who previously thought this was a great idea are now beginning to reconsider.
Murdoch himself has a history of switching the political orientation of his propaganda machine; in the U.K., for instance.
Re:Conservatives Censored by Fairness Doctrine (Score:5, Funny)
Reality has a well known liberal bias. Any law that forces news outlets to reflect reality as it exists rather than as we conservatives wish it were is UNFAIR. Thank God for Fox News.
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Just to follow up (Score:5, Interesting)
I was genuinely interested in seeing if anyone could reference actions attributable to the fairness doctrine that effectively suppressed any point of view. According to the wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org], the Fairness Doctrine:
merely prevented a station from day after day presenting a single view without airing opposing views. The Fairness Doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows or editorials.
It seems likely to allow broadcasters freedom to espouse any point of view they wish while simultaneously giving some access to minority or marginalized points of view, and I'm having trouble imagining how this would play out in such a way as to bury any point of view, conservative or otherwise.
But I'm aware the law of unintended consequences has an amazing reach, and it does say the Supreme court found it had a "chilling effect" on speech. I just don't understand the mechanism and am unfamiliar with any specific case, so I figured I'd *ask* for incidences where the Fairness Doctrine was abused to the suppression of conservative views.
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Re:Conservatives Censored by Fairness Doctrine (Score:5, Informative)
Quote One:
Bill Ruder, an assistant secretary of commerce under President Kennedy, noted, "Our massive strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters in the hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue."
Quote Two:
In a confidential report to the DNC, Martin Firestone, a Washington attorney and former FCC staffer, explained,
"The right-wingers operate on a strictly cash basis and it is for this reason that they are carried by so many small stations. Were our efforts to be continued on a year-round basis, we would find that many of these stations would consider the broadcasts of these programs bothersome and burdensome (especially if they are ultimately required to give us free time) and would start dropping the programs from their broadcast schedule."
https://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-270.html [cato.org]
Cited.
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Unfairness doctrine. (Score:5, Insightful)
The fairness doctrine doesn't censor anything.
It allows for equal time and space of people with opposing or different views.
No. It REQUIRES equal time and space for people with opposing or different views. Big difference.
Conservative talk radio is a business, collecting revenue by attracting ears for advertisers. It spends long blocks of time - like three hour chunks - on particular points of view. The fairness doctrine would require stations playing it to give equal blocks of time - in equivalent timeslots - to anti-conservative viewpoints, which would NOT attract the target demographic. This would be a massive financial hit (in a number of ways) on any station that played a talk show with enough of a point-of-view to invoke the doctrine.
The result would be that such stations would drop political talk shows entirely. This would leave the entire political content of stations coming from their news coverage (which has been shown, by an objective scale developed by Stanford and UCLA researchers, to be massively left-biased). The entertainment content is similarly left-biased (though not subject to the methodology used on news coverage.) As one big talk show host says: "I AM equal time!"
The left has just as much opportunity to field its own talk shows with its own biases. And it has tried, several times. But (with a few notable exceptions in extremely liberal areas, such as KGO radio in San Francisco) their content has failed to attract enough of an audience to be profitable. So shutting down political talk radio by reinstitution of the so-called "fairness doctrine" would have the effect of massively suppressing conservative political viewpoints on broadcast media.
A flip side is that the conservatives could potentially start a news organization of their own, covering conservative viewpoints. Indeed, this HAS been done to some extent, in the form of Fox News. But FNN has shown its true colors in the primary season: It covers only ONE of the four or so major conservative factions' positions and is perfectly happy to blatantly suppress the others.
Starting a new wholly-owned NETWORK by buying a little station in each major market is forbidden by FCC rules, which limit the amount of the population stations owned by a single entity can reach to well under 50%. So they'd have to recruit a lot of independents. (And you can bet, if they were succeeding, there would be attempts to invoke the fairness doctrine against them, adding massive legal costs to the equation.)
So with talk radio as the only broadcast outlet for conservative political thought (but not effective for liberal positions), and liberal political thought dominating entertainment content and most news coverage, shutting down political talk radio by reimposing the fairness doctrine would be a massive blow to the right and a victory for the left.
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Re:far fetched? (Score:5, Informative)
The sites will be vetted to prove that it is secure, that not just anyone can post video "from teh US congrass." Horrors. And it mentions nothing about Nancy Pelosi.
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Re:This keeps opposition off the Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
Please don't vote if you don't realize McCain is a senator is this has to do with House rules.
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Re:hradek (Score:5, Funny)
they are too busy using Iraqi babies as skeet shooting targets
Did they run out of lawyers already?
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Re:And... (Score:5, Informative)
Pelosi has nothing to do with this. Censorship has nothing to do with this.
These scare tactics work for and on conservatives so very well.
Wow.
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