Re "It's not fairness," editorial, July 24
It's amazing that, out of all the conceivable arguments to make against restoring the Fairness Doctrine, your editorial picked the worst: "No matter what your point of view might be, you have free or inexpensive outlets available today to express it -- maybe not a radio or TV station but certainly a website, a video blog, a podcast or an e-mail newsletter."
The idea that somebody's home-made Internet content can ever have the wide audience and reach of a paper like yours, a TV network like Fox or a radio show like Rush Limbaugh's is merely a variation of the old argument that the rich and the poor are equally free to sleep under a bridge. Under today's privatized, hyper-concentrated U.S. media system, the views of those with money and power are disproportionately represented. Those who oppose U.S. imperialism and pro-corporate trade policy, and who advocate labor rights and serious pro-consumer regulation of corporations, have to struggle to be heard at all.
To say we don't need a Fairness Doctrine because opinions censored by private owners of big media companies like yours can still appear somewhere on the Internet -- even though only a tiny fraction of your audience will ever encounter them -- is to proclaim yourselves communications bullies.
