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.