In the past I wrote a blog on the “Fairness Doctrine” and how those on the far left were trying to resurrect it to silence the right wing talk show hosts. The Obama administration has appointed Mark Lloyd Associate General Counsel and Chief Diversity Officer. Now Lloyd wants the independent broadcasters to fund “Public Radio”
Mark Lloyd, newly appointed Chief Diversity Officer of the Federal Communications Commission, has called for making private broadcasting companies pay licensing fees equal to their total operating costs to allow public broadcasting outlets to spend the same on their operations as the private companies do.
Now he may try to claim that this is an attempt to get better programing on public radio but it is more of an attempt to silence “right wing talk show hosts” In an article he co-wrote for Center for American Progress (a progressive/socialist group) he said;
Our analysis in the spring of 2007 of the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners reveals that 91 percent of the total weekday talk radio programming is conservative, and 9 percent is progressive.
They go on further to say;
Quantitative analysis of all 10,506 licensed commercial radio stations in the country suggests that stations owned by racial or ethnic minorities are statistically
less likely to air conservative hosts or shows and more likely to air progressive hosts or shows
Here were there recommendations to force broadcasters to run their programming;
Require radio broadcast licensees to regularly show that they are operating on behalf of the public interest and provide public documentation and viewing of how they are meeting these obligations.
If commercial radio broadcasters are unwilling to abide by these regulatory standards or the FCC is unable to effectively
regulate in the public interest, a spectrum use fee should be levied on owners to directly support local, regional, and national public broadcasting.
A fee based on a sliding scale (1 percent for small markets, 5 percent for the largest markets) would be distributed directly to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with clear mandates to support local news and public affairs programming and to cover controversial and political issues in a fair and balanced manner.
They go on to make the claim;
Taken together, these data seem to indicate that potential one-sidedness on the radio dial in terms of political programming may have just as much to do with who the owners are as it does with the demands of market listeners. Where markets are less concentrated and have more diversity of ownership, we see more variety in programming.
The bottom line is the agenda is not fairness if it were the market would decide. This is not about fairness it is about getting their socialist/progressive agenda out on someone else’s dime. Public radio is funded by government money and listener donations. Public radio has not been a fair and balanced media, it has leaned to the left for quite some time.
Broadcast stations depend on advertising dollars and how much a station can charge are based on Arbitron ratings. They don’t mention this fact in their study, if they had it would have invalidated the majority of the study. The liberal progressives made a feeble attempt to start their own broadcast group “Air America” with an extremely poor following from the public.
To put it into perspective:
In Arbitron’s Spring 2008 ratings book, stations carrying a majority AAR programming and in markets reporting every quarter averaged a 1.3 share. The highest rated Air America affiliates were KPOJ in Portland, Oregon (3.7 share), WXXM in Madison, Wisconsin (3.5), and KABQ in Albuquerque, New Mexico (2.6). The lowest rated affiliates were WDTW and WLBY in Detroit, Michigan (unmeasurable), WOIC in Columbia, South Carolina (0.4), WTKG in Grand Rapids, Michigan (0.5), and flagship station WWRL in New York City (0.5).
To emphisise the perspective the highest rating they got was in the uber liberal City of Madison, WI (affectionately called The peoples republic of madison) and then they only got a 3.5 share. So only 3.5% of the radio listeners in Madison listened to them. In Seattle Rush had a 5.4 share of the audience.
Who does perform well? Conservative talk radio station WIBA which jumped from 6.6 in the winter to 7.6 last quarter. Well known talkers like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity continue to keep that station at the top of the charts.
Now remember Madison is a Progressive/Liberal/socialist area and the listeners of Conservative talk radio is triple that of the Progressive, If you were an advertiser who would you buy time with? If you were an owner, which programming would you put on your station?
Like Comrade Doyle, Obama promised that our taxes were not going to go up. Comrade Doyle increased the taxes on cigarettes by $1.75 per pack in the last two years! The liar in chief said that he has only cut taxes on those making less then $250,000.00. He conveniently forgets the fact that he raised the tax on cigarette tobacco by 2400%, No that is not a Typo 2400%.
