When Liberals Want Your Opinion, They'll Give it To You

During a live report on Fox News last week, correspondent Laura Ingle was assaulted by a passer-by. The male attacker, apparently not a fan of Fox News, grabbed Ms. Ingle's microphone and tried to steal it from her while she was on the air. To Ms. Ingle's credit, she stood her ground and managed to deliver the report after regaining control of her mic.

To me, this incident serves as an interesting parallel to something the Democrats in Congress have been toying with lately: the reinstitution of the so-called Fairness Doctrine. Recently, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, Dianne Feinstein and John Kerry have all gone on record in support of the return of this blatant abridgement of free speech, claiming that talk radio presents only one side of the political debate and should therefore be "balanced" by government intervention.

Liberals run all the major newspapers, the broadcast networks, two cable news channels, most universities and public schools. And they use their dominance in these areas to present their point-of-view virtually unchallenged. Talk radio is the only medium where conservative thought is articulated on a consistent basis, and only because the liberal dominance in all other media created a rather fertile market in talk radio for conservatism. Liberals have failed consistently in the talk radio market, yet have concluded that the problem isn't with them, it's with the market. So rather than compete with conservatives in the talk radio market, liberals have decided instead to attempt legislation designed to diminish the impact of talk radio on the overall debate. They've hitched their wagon to the reintroduction of the "Fairness Doctrine" in the hopes that onerous new regulations will render conservative talk radio too expensive and burdensome to produce...thus shutting it down forever. The "Fairness Doctrine" isn't about fairness at all. Liberals aren't interested in fairness, and they're not interested in debate. Their arguments are too shaky to stand up to legitimate opposition. Like that disguised creep who assaulted Laura Ingle, if liberals don't like what they hear, they don't engage their opponents, they attempt to silence them instead.

Why would Nancy Pelosi want to silence talk radio and abuse free speech? Would it have anything to do with the fact that talk radio exposed her laughable demand for an airplane upgrade? She wanted to stamp her authority as the new House Speaker by getting a larger airplane than the previous Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert had. The fact that her shamefully frivolous demand was at odds with her stated purpose of cleaning up congressional excess was only highlighted by her enemies in talk radio. Perhaps payback is her motive?

Why is Harry Reid so upset with talk radio? Could it be that hosts like Rush Limbaugh were instrumental in helping to defeat the Immigration Bill that Reid tried to ram down our throats? Perhaps he's uncomfortable with the fact that he can no longer hide his shady land deals from the public. Or the fact that we all know that he's had supporters set up dubious make-work lobbying jobs for his sons.

If it was left up to the New York Times, CNN and the networks, no one would have known that Dick Durbin compared American Soldiers unfavorably to Nazis. But Senator Durbin was caught by talk radio, so he's portrayed talk radio as the villain.

Dianne Feinstein is one of the more vocal proponents of the Fairness Doctrine. Could it have anything to do with the fact that talk radio is on to her MILCON scam? Chairing a committee that gave billions of dollars in military contracts to her husband's companies gives Feinstein more than an appearance of impropriety. Meanwhile the mainstream media is too interested in Mark Foley's text messages to bother with this blatant fraud. If DiFi could just make that pesky talk radio go away...

Then, of course, there's poor old John Kerry. Undone on numerous occasions by his foot-in-mouth disease, John F. Kerry, who apparently served in Vietnam, has a notable desire to stamp out talk radio. If it wasn't for John Ziegler in LA, Kerry could have kept his latent hatred for the U.S. Military hidden from the public at large. Instead, his direct insult to the intelligence of American Soldiers was paraded for all to see. Talk radio caught Kerry red-handed insulting the troops, so the Junior Massachusetts Senator had a real problem. But rather than owning up to his disgraceful statements, Kerry sent out apologists like Keith Olbermann to assert embarassingly tortured clarifications (remember the "botched joke" excuse).

Why are liberals afraid to compete in a free marketplace? In my opinion, the network news, the mainstream newpapers, CNN and MSNBC are all biased to the left. I don't usually read these papers or tune into these networks anymore, but I have no right to demand that others follow my lead. We all have the power to change the channel if we don't like the content of what's on the air. But liberals don't appear satisfied with that. If they don't like what's being presented on a particular network or on a particular frequency, many liberals would prefer to steal the microphone than to enage in debate. If a political position can't stand up to much scrutiny or debate, it isn't much of a position, is it?