People don’t always appreciate how the fascist right often cloaks its war against political opponents in terms of fighting indecency.  The Bush Administration crack down a couple years ago on broadcast indecency was usually taken to be a bone tossed at it’s fundamentalist base.  But it was of a piece with the right’s long war on dissent…

You might react by saying that the FCC fines only for exposure of certain portions of skin or particular diction, and it would never punish anyone for expressing a political view. I would respond with three facts.

First, in the 1950s FCC Chairman Doerfer started investigations against TV stations for showing reports done by Edward R. Murrow that were allegedly not sympathetic to famous republican anticommunist Senator Joe McCarthy.

Doerfer was a McCarthy man. McCarthy was such an important figure in the Republican party, similar to Representative Tom Delay today, that his behavior was tolerated by the Republican White House. Indeed, President Eisenhower put two McCarthy people on the commission, among one the Chairman.

Second, while the Washington Post was starting in on the Watergate story, President Nixon’s staff, perhaps at his request, apparently caused his appointed Chairman at the FCC to begin investigations into the Washington Post’s television stations in Florida. The idea, according to then Post publisher Katherine Graham, was to have the investigations cast a cloud on the Post’s continued ownership of the stations, so as to undercut the business model that was supposed to further her initial public offering. Of course, the Post saw this as punishment for its pursuit of the story of the Watergate break-ins.

-Reed Hunt, Regulating Indecency: The Federal Communication Commission’s Threat To The First Amendment (PDF) 

The political cartoonist Herblock used to draw Nixon’s FCC chairman and cronies with a big sign behind them that said "Fairness Doctrine: If It’s Not Pro-Administration, It’s Not Fair"  Even back then attacks on the media by the right wing were fierce and unrelenting.  Anytime a story that was critical of Nixon appeared in the press or on TV there were howls from the right about bias.  But back then the news outlets had a little backbone.  It wasn’t until the right managed to rewrite FCC rules on radio and TV station ownership, rules which once had bipartisan support on the theory that neither party should be allowed to dominate the public airwaves, that the right was able finally to shut progressive viewpoints out of the public debate.

Think Progress has a copy of a report from The Center for American Progress and Free Press posted that documents something we all already know about Radio: it speaks with an almost exclusively conservative voice now:

The Center for American Progress and Free Press today released the first-of-its-kind statistical analysis of the political make-up of talk radio in the United States. It confirms that talk radio, one of the most widely used media formats in America, is dominated almost exclusively by conservatives.

The new report — entitled “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio” — raises serious questions about whether the companies licensed to broadcast over the public radio airwaves are serving the listening needs of all Americans.

While progressive talk is making inroads on commercial stations, right-wing talk reigns supreme on America’s airwaves. Some key findings:

– In the spring of 2007, of the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners, 91 percent of the total weekday talk radio programming was conservative, and only 9 percent was progressive.

– Each weekday, 2,570 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk are broadcast on these stations compared to 254 hours of progressive talk — 10 times as much conservative talk as progressive talk.

– 76 percent of the news/talk programming in the top 10 radio markets is conservative, while 24 percent is progressive.

Note that those top ten markets are either in solidly blue states, or in blue areas of blue states.  The exception being Texas.

Two common myths are frequently offered to explain the imbalance of talk radio: 1) the 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine (which required broadcasters to devote airtime to contrasting views), and 2) simple consumer demand. Each of these fails to adequately explain the root cause of the problem. The report explains:

Our conclusion is that the gap between conservative and progressive talk radio is the result of multiple structural problems in the U.S. regulatory system, particularly the complete breakdown of the public trustee concept of broadcast, the elimination of clear public interest requirements for broadcasting, and the relaxation of ownership rules including the requirement of local participation in management. […]

Ultimately, these results suggest that increasing ownership diversity, both in terms of the race/ethnicity and gender of owners, as well as the number of independent local owners, will lead to more diverse programming, more choices for listeners, and more owners who are responsive to their local communities and serve the public interest.

Along with other ideas, the report recommends that national radio ownership not be allowed to exceed 5 percent of the total number of AM and FM broadcast stations, and local ownership should not exceed more than 10 percent of the total commercial radio stations in a given market.

Read the full report here.

I bought a satellite radio receiver for my car mostly so I didn’t have to listen to hate radio whenever I took my yearly road trips out west.  Anyone who really thought back when the rules were being changed that letting big business rule the airwaves would result in a more consumer choice and more responsiveness to what consumers want to hear either knows now that they were sadly mistaken, or they never listed to radio in the first place and aren’t now.  Of course, anyone who’s paid a utility bill recently in a deregulated market knows exactly how much consumer choice big business wants to let us have.