First things first: Protect your freedom

Free speech is not free. Like all of our freedoms, it was earned with the blood of patriotic Americans who put their principles ahead of their personal safety. It has been defended by generation after generation, but it should not be taken for granted.

As Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

Unfortunately, there seems to be little understanding of that today, which is why for the last several weeks I have been sounding the alarm about threats to the First Amendment that have been broached in recent years. There are unfortunately too many examples to include them all in a short weekly column such as this one, but I will at least try to touch the surface.

The Fairness Doctrine is the most well-known attempt by the federal government to control access to the media. When instituted in 1949 by the Federal Communications Commission, it was intended to “afford reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views of public importance.” Maybe that was “fair” back in 1949 when radio and television were relatively young and stations were relatively few.

But that was then, and this is now. The problem today isn’t getting enough information; it is getting too much. It isn’t getting too few points of view; it is getting too many. Our culture has fractured into a million pieces. Diversity is not our goal; it is our curse.

Mind you, I am not suggesting a new government regulation to restrict access to the media, but it would make just as much sense as bringing back the “Fairness Doctrine,” which died in the mid-1980s. Face it, we already have virtually endless channels with myriad points of view available on cable and satellite TV and on the Internet. On the one hand, if you want balance, all you have to do is change the channel. On the other hand, if you feel overwhelmed by information overload, all you have to do is turn the darned thing off.

But what we don’t want to do is use government regulation to tell broadcasters or other parts of the media how to do their jobs. That is the first step toward censorship. Yet Democrats regularly promote just that.

Sen. John Kerry, the former presidential candidate, said in 2007, “I think the Fairness Doctrine ought to be there, and I also think equal time doctrine ought to come back.”

Last year, Speaker Pelosi told a forum hosted by the Christian Science Monitor that she supports bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, and Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin has said the same.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow has been one of the most outspoken advocates for a return of the Fairness Doctrine, and her words are instructional about what liberals are really after.

In February of this year, Stabenow told radio host Bill Press, “Whether it’s called the “Fairness” standard, whether it’s called something else, I absolutely think it’s time to be bringing accountability to the airwaves. I mean, our new president has talked rightly about accountability and transparency. You know, that we all have to step up and be responsible. And I think in this case there needs to be some accountability and standards put in place.”

Accountability? To whom? Wait a minute, did a U.S. senator really say she thinks that the media needs to report to the government, and give an account of itself for government approval? Unless you can finagle some other interpretation of her words, it sure looks like she did.

And if CBS, ABC and NBC have to report to the government, what really makes our freedom in this country any different than the freedom enjoyed in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, or for that matter, Stalin’s Russia?

And don’t think the threat to free speech stops with broadcasters. Yes, the FCC can dictate to TV and radio stations by invoking the principle that broadcast licenses are a commodity that is granted by the government and therefore subject to government oversight. But what we have learned more and more of late is that government doesn’t need any reason, justification or constitutional provision to infringe on our freedoms. The Constitution is largely irrelevant to our lawmakers, who seem to think that mustering a slim majority of votes in Congress is sufficient cause to do anything they want.

That’s why people who crow about the inviolability of the “free press” make me laugh. They explain pedantically that the print media is safe from government “accountability” or pressure, thanks to the First Amendment, but they forget that smart socialists are hard at work in law schools formulating new rules, regulations and policies that will make the world safe for “progressive” causes.

Controlling and intimidating the media is clearly part of that agenda. And if you can’t “abridge the freedom” of the print media because of the First Amendment, that doesn’t mean you can’t intimidate them — or buy them.

That’s right, buy them.

After all, there is no “separation of press and state” written into the Constitution, is there? What we have is an informal agreement that the country works best if the government doesn’t own the media, but in our post-Obama efforts to “transform” the country, who knows what cherished traditions will be jettisoned as “old-fashioned” or “anti-progressive”?

Groups like Free Press are encouraging the government to subsidize newspapers as non-profit entities, which will thus inevitably be subject to review and extortion. Robert McChesney, the avowed socialist who is cofounder of Free Press, has called for direct federal subsidies to newspapers as well as Americorps “volunteers” staffing newsrooms. He also blithely denies that this would result in state-run media. Reminds me of the rhetoric after President Obama took over General Motors but denied he was in the car business.

By the way, Free Press worked with Obama to develop his communications policies prior to the 2008 election and has been to the White House several times since then. That doesn’t mean the president is a socialist, but if guilt by association were evidence in a court of law, then President Obama would stand convicted of having bad judgment in his choice of friends at least.

Here’s some of what McChesney has had to say for himself in the past year:

— “Any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself.” —From his Sept. 2008 Monthly Review article on “The U.S. Media Reform Movement.”

— “There is no real answer [to the U.S. economic crisis] but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.” From his Dec. 2008 Monthly Review essay, “A New New Deal under Obama?”

— “Only government can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism... The democratic state, the government, must create the conditions for sustaining the journalism that can provide the people with the information they need to be their own governors.” From his article, “The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers,” in the April 6, 2009, edition of The Nation magazine.

If those quotes don’t scare you, then you have your head so far up your Marxist philosophy that the sunlight of freedom doesn’t shine any more.

McChesney is in the same socialist bandwagon as several other past and present players on the Obama team. That includes the soon-to-be-ex-White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, the FCC Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd, and former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones.

Dunn famously took on Fox News as “a wing of the Republican Party” and then was outed for her own role as a proponent of the “Mao wing” of the Communist Party. Lloyd has gone on record as promoting “fairness” in the media through “structural” changes, and Van Jones is the guy responsible for the catchy slogan, “You cannot have an opposition movement without opposition media.” (Did I mention that Jones was a board member of Free Press until 2008? Did I say Free Press? Oh yeah, I meant Controlled Media.)

The bottom line is that President Obama has surrounded himself with partisans who are so far to the left that they are a danger not just to the “radical right” but to freedom as we know it.

Hard to believe? Partisan caterwauling? Maybe. Or maybe we are just so complacent we don’t know a threat when we see it. It has been just 20 years since Ronald Reagan left office, and it appears this generation may be the one he warned us against, the one that would let freedom slip away.

And if you don’t want to listen to Ronald Reagan because he was a (shudder) Republican, then perhaps you will listen to John Adams because he was a Founding Father of our country.

“Posterity,” he wrote, “you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.”

n Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake and writes a weekly column. E-mail responses may be sent to edit@dailyinterlake.com