ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, Sept. 3 2009

Beware Uncle Sam's interest in new and old media
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

Amid all the hubbub lately over a possible government takeover of health care,
many Americans concerned about federal power grabs have overlooked another
threat to their liberty: the recent series of attempts by Uncle Sam to encroach
on free speech and freedom of the press.

The first came this spring with the introduction of the Cybersecurity Act of
2009. Championed by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., the bill would grant the
president power to shut down public and private Internet networks for national
security reasons or in the case of a "cybersecurity emergency." After
complaints from industry and consumer groups, the bill was revised to omit some
of its more controversial language. But it still gives the president the
authority to declare an emergency in which he would "direct a national
response" that could include halting Internet traffic — an unprecedented power
that could easily be abused for political purposes under the vaguely worded
legislation.

Americans concerned about the government stifling the free flow of information
and opinion found another reason to worry in July, when communications lawyer
Mark Lloyd was named "Chief Diversity Officer" at the Federal Communications
Commission. One can get a sense of Lloyd's idea of diversity from a 2007 report
he co-authored for the liberal Center for American Progress, which decried the
ubiquity of conservative voices on talk radio and called for increased
government regulation to rectify this "structural imbalance."

Among the fixes Lloyd and his co-authors endorsed were stricter FCC regulation
of radio stations to make sure they are serving "the public interest" — a
nebulous standard more likely to match the biases of FCC regulators than any
objective criteria — and hefty fines for station owners that fail to pass this
"public interest" test. The report recommended funneling the estimated $100
million to $250 million windfall from fines against conservative radio stations
to the famously left-leaning public broadcasting establishment, which Lloyd and
his co-authors consider "fair and balanced."

Lest FCC bureaucrats have all the fun interfering in America's media markets,
the Federal Trade Commission recently announced plans to sponsor a series of
workshops aimed at shoring up the mainstream media monopoly that has been
threatened by the rising popularity of online news and opinion outlets. A
commission press release says the workshops, scheduled for December, will
explore "governmental policies — including antitrust, copyright, and tax policy
— that have been raised as possible means of finding new ways for journalism to
thrive."

Given that the FTC exists to protect American consumers, it's difficult to see
how consumers' changing media consumption habits merit the commission's
concern, much less its overt attempts to use federal policies to help the old
media establishment triumph over its new media competitors. The FTC journalism
workshops appear to be a thinly veiled attempt to curry favor with the
mainstream print and broadcast media outlets that rightly have been criticized
by news consumers for their fawning, uncritical coverage of Obama. They also
may mark the first stirrings of a push for greater government control over all
media, new and old, seized under the guise of "saving" American journalism.

It has been puzzling to hear so few journalists speaking out against these
federal forays into media affairs, and to see how many Obama supporters are
willing to wink at his administration's appetite for curtailing free speech and
the free flow of information. As much as liberals may yearn for an America free
of Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and the legions of conservative bloggers who
criticize their views, they should remember that a government powerful enough
to silence your critics someday will silence you, too.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host and St.
Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.