Don't Sweat the Fairness Doctrine?

Over at the Next Right, Patrick Ruffini writes that conservatives shouldn’t waste their time crying wolf about the Fairness Doctrine, a regulation that would mandate equal time for political opinions on public airwaves and thus kill conservative talk radio. Ruffini notes that the re-imposition of the Fairness Doctrine would “constitute a direct provocation to the Right without any tangible political benefit in the Center or the Left”, and, futhermore, Obama said he does not want to bring it back. Focus on legitimate threats like nationalized health care and card check, he writes. But Conn Carroll responds:

Yes, Obama is too smart to bring back the ‘Fairness Doctrine’. You are absolutely not going to see any movement in Congress to pass legislation forcing the FCC to revive the same rule it abandoned in 1987. But as the Center for American Progress points out, Congress does not need to pass any new legislation: “The public obligations inherent in the Fairness Doctrine are still in existence and operative, at least on paper.” Instead you will see a regulatory push at the FCC to intimidate conservative radio stations by shortening their licensing requirements from every eight, to every three years, and forcing them to meet stepped up “public interest” requirements. This new standard would be just as vague and ripe for abuse as the old Fairness Doctrine ever was. … a re-regulation of radio broadcasting along the lines that CAP envisions is a real threat to freedom of speech. And the way Obama will porbably go about it, bypassing Congress and using a bureacratic out of touch regulatory body, is exactly the route the Obama administration is probably going to take on cap and trade as well. As Patrick points out CAP “president John Podesta is leading the Obama transition” and he “is dead serious.”

An article by Marin Cogin in The New Republic argues that concerns about the Fairness Doctrine were mere “Republican paranoia.” After all, Cogin writes, most Democrats don’t really want to bring it back. According to Dick Durbin’s press secretary: