The Plan To Rein In Free Speech

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Thursday, October 11, 2007 4:20 PM PT

Media: A manufactured flap over Rush Limbaugh has stirred talk of new "fairness doctrine" hearings in Congress. That's just what Media Matters, the flacks behind it, were after. Their agenda is worse than it looks.

Media Matters, a left-wing nuisance group, recently sought headlines by distorting a Sept. 26 conversation between conservative radio commentator Limbaugh and a listener about a soldier who misrepresented his military record.

Media Matters screamed that Limbaugh, whose record of supporting U.S. troops is long and real, was insulting anti-war soldiers as "phony."

The claim was as silly as the one Media Matters made a week earlier about Fox News host Bill O'Reilly being a racist — a distortion so egregious it drew a smack-down from liberal commentator Juan Williams in Time magazine.

In both cases, truth-telling wasn't important. Media Matters' aim wasn't to correct misinformation, but to create a media feeding frenzy to scare sponsors and drive Limbaugh off the air. That's its low goal.

Its higher aim is to push for restoration of the 1949 Federal Communications Commission regulation known as the "Fairness Doctrine," so that any successful conservative radio voice is matched by a leftist with equal time.

The Reagan administration threw out most of the law back in 1987, a move that made Limbaugh's popular program possible. Now the left wants to subsidize the "progressive" media, whose ideas are otherwise unsalable in the commercial market.

Why would the antics of a so-called "media watchdog"' be of any significance? Aren't such pests best ignored?

Yes and no. Media Matters used the same tactics against Limbaugh to get Don Imus fired last April. But unlike the Imus case, it had no facts to back its claim against Limbaugh, so its bid for buzz fizzled this time.

Having failed with the public, the group may be moving on to Congress. Its Web screeds against Limbaugh have already influenced 41 senators to condemn him to his sponsors in an Oct. 2 letter. Now the American Spectator quotes an anonymous congressional source as saying House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman intends to monitor right-wing commentators.

Waxman's Web site disputed that report as "fictitious." Of Limbaugh, it said: "There is not now nor has there ever been any investigation of this subject," suspiciously using the present tense as Bill Clinton once did to parse his own scandal denials.

More important, Waxman's office posted no denial that Fairness Doctrine hearings might be under discussion, which is what this is really about. The Spectator, meanwhile, stood by its story.

The reason the Fairness Doctrine keeps coming up in Congress might be related to Media Matters, a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization that claims to be nonpartisan yet says it exists to correct "conservative misinformation" in the media.

Media Matters' last publicly available IRS filing (2005) shows it spent $11,598 on lobbying to influence a legislative body, and even more a year earlier, when it launched its first public campaign for the Fairness Doctrine.

Founded in 2003, the group had revenue of $8.5 million in 2005 and is run by David Brock, a conservative journalist turned "progressive" who took a salary of $182,000, according to that same filing.

Sen. Hillary Clinton says she helped found the group, and her closely associated think tank, the Center for American Progress, gave it funding and office space. Media Matters also receives funds from the radical MoveOn.org, and the secretive rich man's club known as Democracy Alliance, all of which have taken money from George Soros, who has donated considerable cash to different media groups who promote the Fairness Doctrine.

The Soros crowd has a special cold spot for both Limbaugh and Fox News. At a CAP-sponsored event in June 2006, Soros associate Mark Malloch Brown, shortly before he quit his United Nations deputy chief post to work for Soros' Quantum Fund and serve as vice chairman of Soros' Open Society Institute, denounced the U.S. "heartland" for "too much unchecked U.N.-bashing," and explicitly blamed "Rush Limbaugh and Fox News"

Media Matters intimidates the press, first, by branding all mainstream media reporters who don't toe its radical line as hopelessly right wing and, second, by promoting the Fairness Doctrine as a weapon against the real right-wingers who are the most popular media commentators.

The first job is easy. On its Web site, the group maintains a de facto McCarthy-like blacklist — where mainstream mainstays such as the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, CNN's Candy Crowley and MSNBC's Chris Matthews can read about their right-wing transgressions and find their names lumped in with authentic conservative opinionists.

In its angry rants of "conservative" media transgressions behind each name, Media Matters publishes the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of reporters — it doesn't do it for its own writers — to encourage badgering calls.

It also keeps in contact with other reporters and tries to shame those who step out of line on key issues. The group throws as much as it can out there and waits to see what sticks. In all, it's a simple intimidation operation.

To keep the real right-wing opinionists in line, it applies hard-core pressure on advertisers and politicians in the hope of reducing their influence.

Media Matters' early patron, the Center for American Progress, has done at least one position paper on the Fairness Doctrine; it seeks to rationalize the success of conservative talk radio as merely industry consolidation rather than, as Air America's bankruptcy and bailout demonstrate, something the public actually wants.

In "The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio," CAP claimed that right-wing talk radio has saturated the airwaves and implied that there's no choice and the free market cannot satisfy listeners' "needs."

It calls for restoring local and national caps on commercial radio station ownership, wants more "local accountability" over licensing, and seeks to "require commercial owners who fail to abide by enforceable public interest obligations to pay a fee to support public broadcasting."

That's right, a fee, or subsidy, to the otherwise unsalable leftist points of view. Perhaps not coincidentally, CAP and Media Matters have many staffers with experience at public stations such as National Public Radio.

There's also the Bill Moyers link. His Schumann Center for Media and Democracy has funded Media Matters. According to "The Shadow Party," a 2006 book by David Horowitz and Richard Poe, Moyers, formerly of NPR, is one of Soros' closest friends.

Audience demand determines a radio show's success, not the size of the owner — except indirectly as a measure of past success. After all, how do these stations get big? In the cable and Internet era, there is no restricted access to any point of view as there might have been in 1949. Viewers, listeners and readers choose what they want to hear.

As Congress futzes with "Fairness Doctrine" talk, it's not the output of radio announcers that needs monitoring, but the radical, anti-free speech agenda of groups that would monitor the media.

They don't really mean just to monitor speech. As the CAP report shows, they mean to control it.