Nancy Pelosi vs. the Internet 561
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.'"
Direct link to the letter in question (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
Re:far fetched? (Score:4, Informative)
It sounds more innocuous the way I spelled it out, but the end result is the same. A committee would have to give prior approval to anything that appears on a non-official site, and approve the site.
(-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: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.
Right wing mods can go to hell (Score:3, Informative)
Modding the truth as troll won't make it any less true, assholes. Read the letter.
In fact... (Score:1, Informative)
In fact, the Fairness Doctrine was instituted by conservatives in like 1949 to censor liberals and Communits [wikipedia.org].
It wasn't until the neocons started appearing ion the scene during the Reagan Administration that conservatives were suddenly "against" the Fairness Doctrine.
Never understood why... (Score:2, Informative)
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.
How hard is it to Google? Plenty of support (Score:1, Informative)
Seems to me a lot of people here don't want to believe something that is easily verified.
Re:Sorry for the inconvenient truth, but (Score:1, Informative)
Pelosi's support for the revival of the Fairness Doctrine, aka "Hush Rush" bill, has been widely reported. Google is your friend.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=27185
Yahoo News search on "fairness doctrine" [yahoo.com]
I found a lot of links to partisan hacks claiming that what you say is true. When you say "widely reported" what you really mean is that quite a few conservative news outlets took the one story you cited and it's very limited contextual information and ran with it.
Spin spin spin. You should be ashamed of trying to pass this off as a well known fact.
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...
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.
Did I read something different ? (Score:4, Informative)
Honestly, where in this link, embedded in the article, say anything about limiting members' capabilities to discuss anything?
http://gopleader.gov/UploadedFiles/Capuano_letter.PDF [gopleader.gov]
All the recommendations say is that members of the House should find suitable external sites to host their video content and try to maintain a modicum of their ethics by trying to find sites that don't have advertisements that will be associated with the video content.
Nowhere do the recommendations suggest members of the House can't speak with their constituents or say what they want to. It only recommends that they use "official" house.gov channels to do so.
Re:Fraud Alert: Slashvertisement? (Score:1, Informative)
What percentage of talk radio is liberal vs conservative? Here is one "study" from a liberal group. http://thinkprogress.org/2007/06/20/radio-report/ [thinkprogress.org]
Now, tell me how, if the fairness doctrine is to "equalize" time for viewpoints on the airwaves, that it is NOT DEVISED to censor many conservative viewpoints? And also, who determines what content is conservative and what content is liberal?
Re:The democratic party in a nutshell: (Score:2, Informative)
It's not about corporations its about bankers. Both the republicans and the democrats get their marching orders from the likes of the CFR. The real people in control are the federal reserve. They have last names like Rockefeller, Warburg, Carnigie. These jokers have had their shadow government set up since 1913 when they bought Wilson and most of the press. Check out your choices for president this year(hint they are both CFR members). As to getting a 3rd party canidate in good l
Re:Fraud Alert: Slashvertisement? (Score:2, Informative)
"Fraud Alert: The Slashdot story seems to be without support elsewhere. It may be a paid Slashvertisement. "
Here are just a few:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121452148199808879.html
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/120243
http://www.myjournalcourier.com/articles/apparently_18892___article.html/nancy_called.html
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/2008/07/congress_banning_social_media/
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/jul/06/fairness-or-censorship/
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=27338
http://www.newsroomamerica.com/politics/story.php?id=422649
Re:Fraud Alert: Slashvertisement? (Score:2, Informative)
What's most interesting is that it should be clear, this letter is a response to House members' complaints that:
* House.gov tools for posting video are not very user friendly.
* House.gov is out of disk space.
In order to continue responding to increased demand for video, House members need the ability to use other sites. Maybe they are considering big sites like YouTube as a place they can put content which would otherwise *have* to go on House.gov. A lot of candidates are using YouTube for official campaign videos, perhaps they just want the same simple forum for actively communicating with their constituents, so that we don't all feel they *only* know how to get and stay in office. Some of them write laws and, apparently, deal with issues that most slashdot users do every day, like filling hard drives. ;)
I don't see that this in any way creates new restrictions or has anything to do with members of any party, or talk radio, or twitter, or blogging..
C'mon Slashdot, did YOU read the PDF? Please don't post political stories about documents without reading them, or at least change the title from:
"Nancy Pelosi vs. The Internet"
to:
"Crazy Blogger makes up story about House.gov IT solution to full drives." ;)
Re:Fable of the King Tree (Score:4, Informative)
Re:far fetched? (Score:3, Informative)
To post offical house things. There is a world of difference.
I doubt you can post offical business things willy-nilly in your employers name either.
And the site approval is to ensure that you don't get offical house messages next to partisan ads, etc, which it would look like the federal government was endorsing.
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.
Re:Conservatives Censored by Fairness Doctrine (Score:3, Informative)
The fairness doctrine doesn't censor anything.
The 1984 Supreme Court disagrees with you. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=468&invol=364 [findlaw.com]
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.
Re:The Hen or The Egg (Score:4, Informative)
And if you look at Cogresses approval numbers [latimes.com], which are in the single digits, it's obvious that's it's not just republicans or conservatives that are unhappy.
Re:The democratic party in a nutshell: (Score:3, Informative)
One of those is Mrs. Unelectable #1. Cynthia Mckinney is running for the Green Party.
Re:libs own the media? (Score:1, Informative)
Many things come to mind when reading your comment:
- You didn't follow the link in my post that shows conclusively how biased the media is
- You have no proof that it is a "Karl Rove-inspired myth" or I presume you would have provided a link. Bluster doesn't win an argument, and yours is somewhat tiresome
- Have you ever looked at those boards and such you mention? What do you think it proves, that rich guys are all Republicans? Wrong! [toptechwriter.us]