Adam Reilly – 2parse

Marin Cogan in an investigative piece in The New Republic has trouble finding any media-reform liberals or Democrats who are actually want to bring the Fairness Doctrine back or are trying to do so.

As Kevin Drum points out at The Washington Monthly:

Given the collapse of the Republican Party’s electoral fortunes, folks like Limbaugh and Michael Gerson have to create a rallying cry, and there’s no better way to whip up the Republican base than to make far-right activists feel like victims. “Liberals are coming to take away your talk radio!” is, obviously, pretty effective.

At the same time, a conservative effort is underway to label legislation protecting net neutrality (which prevents the internet from being structured to favor certain sites over others and was one of the founding principles of the internet) a “Fairness Doctrine for the Internet,” which may be the only chance the big corporations who oppose net neutrality have to stop it – as Adam Reilly of The Boston Phoenix pointed out, citing me.

It seems the Fairness Doctrine is one of the key components conservatives will be using to keep their partisan backs up in the coming lean years – as well as being a potential fundraising tool.

Adam Reilly Argues Against the Fairness Doctine

[digg-reddit-me]This blog has a new favorite newspaper – the alternative weekly Boston Phoenix which I actually used to read while I went to college in Massachusetts.

Adam Reilly, media critic for the paper, recently fashioned an argument against the Fairness Doctrine – including the specter of it being used against Net Neutrality:

Regarding Net Neutrality, McDowell asked, “Will Web sites — will bloggers have to give equal time or equal space on their Web site to opposing views, rather than letting the marketplace of ideas determine that?”

This is a stupid question. The Fairness Doctrine involved government mandating, in certain cases, that specific content be added to a particular media entity. In contrast, Net Neutrality doesn’t involve intrusion into content; it only dictates absolute freedom of (virtual) movement. It’s the opposite of what McDowell seems to think.

But as Joe Campbell, author of the blog 2parse.com, recently noted in a post linking Thierer’s paper and McDowell’s remarks, this is about tactics, not logic. If conservative Net Neutrality supporters come to see it as the Fairness Doctrine 2.0 — something that’s more easily done if the Fairness Doctrine is already on everyone’s brain, as it is today — they might rethink their support. Given Democratic gains in Congress and Obama’s support for Net Neutrality, Campbell argues, “This is the big corporations’ only chance to squash Net Neutrality.”

Now that’s a scary prospect. The Web is the future of news media. (It’s also a battleground where, at the moment, Democrats are totally dominating Republicans.) Bringing back the Fairness Doctrine is a dubious proposition, period. But if doing so could jeopardize the success of Net Neutrality, it’s downright reckless.