The Benefits of Reinstituting the Fairness Doctine

christopher Chantrill notes that the Democratic effort to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine because talk radio is to "structurally imbalanced to the right" might actually be a good thing for conservatives.

Could we all hit Pause on the outrage remote just a moment? I know it is the most delicious fun to roll tape on our conservative outrage when Democrats propose to think about a proposal to study an investigation to reinstate the FCC Fairness Doctrine. But let us not lose our heads.

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We all know the real story of talk radio. Back in 1988 the experts told Rush Limbaugh and his partners that the concept of talk radio would never work, certainly not on AM Radio, and obviously not during the middle of the busy broadcast day. The rest is history.

If only Halpin et al. were right and talk radio were really a mighty predator mauling the herds of liberal antelope peacefully grazing on the vast grasslands of the welfare state. The truth is that talk radio and the conservative blogosphere are sub-cultures. The real culture is the mainstream media, the schools, the universities, the arts community, Hollywood, and popular music, not to mention MySpace, FaceBook, and so on.

It tells us a lot about the narrowness and the meanness of our liberal friends that they cannot endure a thriving sub-culture in the midst of their overwhelming mainstream culture.

Fortunately for them they are lefties. Otherwise we would know what to call their attack on talk radio: Fascism. Paraphrasing the words of Benito Muccioliberale: "Everything for diversity; nothing outside diversity; nothing against diversity."

We conservatives should not get too worked up by the Fairness Doctrine flap. Fact: The genie of talk radio is out of the bottle. Fact: The conservative movement is joined up today in the internet in a way it never was before. Prediction: If the Democrats get into the White House in 2008 and pass restrictions on conservative speech it will unify and energize conservatives into a murderous rage. In America there's nothing like a bit of light-to-moderate oppression to get the juices flowing, and a liberal campaign to restore the Fairness Doctrine could be just what the doctor ordered.

In 2007 we conservatives are in retreat. For armies that is the most difficult kind of operation to bring off. If you can conduct a retreat successfully then you can keep the army together and live to fight another day. Morale is everything. So go ahead, liberals.

Unify us, why don't you.

Reunifiying the conservative movement would be an accomplishment that liberals never thought they could pull off. But bringing back speech and thought control would certainly do it-in a big way.