I protest.

Getting the information out.

From Simbaud, Fear of Fairness, where he quotes part of a Bill Moyers interview with Rep Louise Slaughter about the now long-defunct FCC Fairness Doctrine. When I was a child and even through college, when a political statement or opinion was broadcast on television (or, I guess on radio), the broadcaster was obligated by FCC regulation to allow a representative of an opposing viewpoint or political affiliation to rebut the statement on the air and in (if I remember correctly) the same amount of time. This was at the broadcaster's expense, so even an organization with few sources of funding could publically state, on the air, their opposition to whatever opinion or viewpoint had been advocated. Louise Slaughter described it to Moyers this way:

Pretty much that you had an obligation to present two sides of an issue. There wasn't really an obligation to go out and hunt for somebody if something outrageous was said on a station that you owned, or television station. But if someone asked to come on to present an opposing view, they were allowed to do it. And the stations were obligated to do it. And most station owners that I've talked to have said it wasn't onerous. They didn't find it all that difficult.

This lasted until 1986 (the year I graduated from college), when the FCC discarded the regulation and Reagan vetoed legislation that would have codified it into law. And the Democratic Party, which at the time controlled Congress, refused to even try to override the veto.

Now, nearly twenty years later, Limbaugh and his ilk have a near-monopoly on mass communication. As Slaughter said, "at least half the people in the United States have no voice because they're not allowed in on talk radio" due to media consolidation and the stranglehold the Right has on radio and television broadcasting.

We must bring back the Fairness Doctrine or something like it. The only way the owners of Fox News, MSNBC, CNN and the rest will allow opposing viewpoints to be presented is if they are forced to do so, because they quite clearly will not do so voluntarily. If they are forced to allow us to do so, we would have the chance to interrupt the unending stream of right-wing distortions and lies. Of course, we could try to buy the time, but that doesn't always work when the corporation with which you're dealing is so biased that it will refuse to air your statements regardless. See recent events involving Sinclair and CBS.

So, without a Fairness Doctrine, how do you get the messages out? (And it's not just one message, it's a response to every single misstatement, distortion, misrepresentation, omission and lie made by the Right.) Blogs ain't gonna do it. As good as they might be, Blog for America, Kicking Ass, even Eschaton and the Daily Kos just aren't going to get the messages to people in places like East Texas (where I spent far too much of my childhood). Or to the people of the farms of Kansas and Nebraska, or anywhere else where people are inundated with Limbaugh constantly and without respite or a dissenting voice.

Echidne asks in the Bowtie Parade why people like Molly Ivins, Al Franken or other well-known personalities on the Left don't have television shows while Tucker "Lying Hack" Carlson gets his very own on MSNBC. She says,

The answer is, of course, so very simple. The media is not liberal. It is owned by right-wingers, and the bits that are not are scared of our present government's maffia-like tactics. Those who speak against the government are punished: reputations are lost overnight, new jobs don't materialize and vilification will go on 24/7. You can get away with a little criticism if you are like Bill Moyers, well-known, respected and retiring anyway. For anyone else it's a really suicidal mission.

Meanwhile, the Left makes up a vanishingly small fraction of media voices, while the Right makes an ever louder din.

Obviously Air America isn't enough. Compared even to right-wing radio, the left has only a tiny voice, and there simply are no left-wing television stations. Hell, these days there aren't even any left-wing shows, with the sole exception of, as Echidne points out, Bill Moyers' Now, which with his retirement is going from an hour to thirty minutes.

So what can we do? Well, one thing, at least, that can be done, is for our elected representatives to start actually representing us, by standing up to those bullies, liars and hypocrites in Congress and demanding that we be heard. While the Republicans have successfully silenced most of us, they cannot (yet) silence their Democratic colleagues. Unfortunately, besides Nancy Pelosi, who in either house really makes themselves heard? Apparently Daschle was annoying enough that the bullies concentrated on defeating him, but they must be damned thin-skinned, because Daschle was about as inoffensive as they come. And what we need is offense. The Republicans have been too damned offensive for far too long, and it is long past the time they should be receiving the same in return.

So why aren't our Senators and Representatives taking every single opportunity they have to deconstruct the lies and distortions constantly put forth by the Republicans and the Bush administration? Why isn't every Democrat speech in the Senate and House peppered with direct attacks on those lies?

Certainly here in my little corner of the universe there's not a lot I can do. My audience is tiny (although appreciated), so nothing I write here will get very far. What I can do, though, is write this and reach those I can. I can write my Senators (Feinstein and Boxer) and my Representative (Harman) and not just request but as much as demand that they leave defense and go on the attack. That they start screaming loudly every minute, that every single fucking time a Republican makes a statement, a Democrat is there shouting him down, calling him the liar he is. That they start beating up the media for abrogating its responsibility to report the truth, not just "he said, she said" assertions. That they use every single tool at their disposal to oppose, impede, delay or slow Republican programs. No matter what those programs happen to be, because if it's a Republican program, you can be damned sure that there's something about it that stinks. And that goes double for the Executive Branch.

I'll be sending copies of my letters to the local papers, as well.

So that's what I can do. What you can do, if you actually want things to change for the better rather than continue to plummet down the Republican cliff they've driven us off, is to write your own letters to your own Senators and Representatives. Then you can spread the word in whatever way you can.

I, for one, will not meekly submit to the tyranny that the Republicans seem to want to impose upon us. I refuse to sit quietly and allow them to return us to the era of unregulated corporations, powerless workers and starving old people. I just hope that words and political action can defeat them, because if that is not the case, we have a long, terrible struggle ahead of us.