Talk Radio 'Dominated' By Right

by Kara Rowland - June 22nd, 2007 - The Washington Times

A report from a liberal think tank yesterday criticized the "right-wing domination of talk radio," saying the current landscape does not serve all Americans.

In a report titled "The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio," the Center for American Progress concluded that 91 percent of weekday talk radio is conservative, compared with liberal content at 9 percent. The group, which said it analyzed 257 news and talk stations owned by the five biggest radio broadcasters, calls for stricter media-ownership limits and public-interest requirements.

"There is little free speech or free choice in a market system that pushes out one-sided information 90 percent of the time on the radio," said John Halpin, a senior fellow at the center. "Radio stations are licensed to operate in the public interest. Promoting one point of view over all others does not meet any reasonable public-interest standard."

The study also analyzed all commercial news and talk stations in the top 10 markets, where it deemed 76 percent of programming conservative and 24 percent liberal.

Democrats seized on the findings, touting the study as further evidence that government intervention to make the media more "fair" is needed.

This is so bizarre. Democrats (with their liberal, progressive and socialist minions) control broadcast TV, cable TV, newspapers, magazines and book publishing. Democrats have a competitive share of the Internet news and commentary (blogs) even though Libertarians and Conservatives have the lead. But Democrats DOMINATE the largest forms of news dissemination. For some reason that is not good enough. They cannot tolerate conservatives having a single forum to present their views.

Let's get some perspective. Talk radio is only a portion of the 16% slice of radio listeners who make up the news-talk-sports segment. Take out sports and pure news from this 16% slice and you are talking a really small part of total radio. Democrats are ready to pass legislation to control what can be said on that one small slice called "political" talk radio alone. They are perfectly willing to return to the days when free speech was under tyrannical control of Democrat thought police. They called it the "fairness doctrine" then before it was ended because it so clearly violated feedom of speech. What it represented back then was government bureaucrats making sure that no one disagreed with the liberal doctrines which they were touting as "politically correct" speech. "Fairness"? There was nothing fair about it then. There is nothing fair about it now. It is nothing but government control of speech by liberals violating everything they claim they believe in.

The hypocrisy of this proposed Democrat legislation is that it only applies to that one small segment of news dissemination that liberals do not dominate. Talk radio became the forum for conservatives because they were denied any significant voice in most other media forms. Newspapers and TV are dominated by liberals and socialists. Democrats find it "outrageous" that conservatives have ANY place to voice their views. Their willingness to shut down conservative voices, to destroy free speech, is hypcrisy in its most malignant and evil form. They call it "fair" to make radio stations force people to listen to liberals views and thoughts in the ONLY media forum where conservatives currently have the lead.

If we proposed to apply the same "fairness doctrine" to TV, newspapers, magazines and book publishing, Democrats would go beserk.