I just get all giggly when I hear the right-wingers are scared the Democrats are going to bring back the 'Fairness Doctrine'. It's so old media.
The real action is focused on new media and making sure we all have equal access both as producers and consumers. This equal access is called "Net Neutrality".
As a recent editorial in the New York Times explains:
Net neutrality laws are necessary to ensure that Internet service providers do not block content they disagree with or give financial breaks to big tech companies, squeezing out smaller competitors and stifling innovation
In a sense we lost the battle for Net Neutrality in broadcast media years ago. That's why we've got a ton of right-wing talk shows even in the most liberal parts of the country. Only a right-winger would attribute this imbalance to the right-wing agenda's supposed higher entertainment value. In fact, it's all about ownership.
Marketplace of Ideas
That's why net neutrality is so important. The Internet is literally our only line of mass communication that doesn't go through the prism of corporate media. Of course, this is true not only for our message but the messages of every political perspective, and that's the point. No one has an advantage. In the marketplace of ideas we're competing finally on an equal basis.
Americans are now able to weigh the pros and cons of alternative approaches on the merits alone; they're able to exchange ideas and organize at an unprecedented level. Not surprisingly, we liberals appear to be doing pretty well in this environment. We appear to be doing pretty well not because of some bias in the new system but because the biases of the old system have suddenly been removed.
And that's the way we want to keep it.
Our Only Pipe
The medium itself is neutral. Bytes have no political affiliation. The only way to undermine such equality is to suddenly privilege one set of bits over another. That's what Net Neutrality intends to prevent. The greatest danger to this new form of communication is to embed it with all the limitations and restrictions of the old system.
The media and telecommunication conglomerates are dying to move in this direction. It's our obligation to preserve the current open system. It's the only system we've got.
