Fairness Doctrine, Schmairness Doctrine
I’ve fallen into the role of being the political analyst for my work and home. When they see or hear something, they call me to ask for my insight, and hope I know what I’m talking aboot. A few days ago, it was a co-worker asking me aboot the “Fairness Doctrine.”
You can google or wiki the Fairness Doctrine; I don’t feel like explaining it. In short, it has conservative talk radio all in a tizzy that P.E. BAM is going to bring it back to put them out of business. Now, never mind the overall silliness of that statement, what bothers me is hearing valuable air time being wasted on that junk instead of issues that actually matter.
As Patrick Ruffini puts it:
Even with the proliferation of media, there is only so much bandwidth in the media ecosystem for conservative opposition messages. Do you really want to waste it on a nothing-burger like the Fairness Doctrine? There are enough legitimate threats — endless bailouts, runaway deficit spending, nationalized health care, card check — that I don’t think we can afford to throw away our limited political capital on a non-issue.
There’s a lot of talk aboot what the GOP needs to do to rebuild itself to be bigger, stronger, and faster. A start would be if we start to focus on actually issues and not jive like this.
