The N&O’s Talk Radio Spin (Post 1)

The liberal trending left Raleigh News & Observer today “reported” to readers on efforts to bring back something called “the Fairness Doctrine.” The story began:

After conservative radio talk show hosts helped bury an immigration bill, Republican Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi complained that "talk radio is running America."

Lott suggested a remedy that immediately got talk-show hosts talking: He suggested bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, which would force broadcasters to provide more political balance on the nation's airwaves.

"It's absurd," said Mike Shanin, a self-described conservative radio-talk show host in Kansas City, Mo.

Shanin said there's no doubt that liberals have been left behind in the world of talk radio and that it makes perfect economic sense: "If liberal talk worked, it would be on. It's been tried." . . .

Shanin's right as far as he goes. Liberal talk radio has, for the most part, failed when forced to compete the free-market environment. It just can’t stand up to conservative talk radio in that environment.

But liberal talk radio has been hugely successful when granted government subsidies and other special considerations. Just look at the hundreds of NPR stations across America.

That’s why liberals want government agencies at all levels to spend more money supporting NPR stations.

It’s even likely that most liberals agree with leftists that the government should invoke the discredited, out-of-date and unfair “Fairness Doctrine” to limit the access conservatives and others have to the airwaves.

Further along the N&O offers a subhead,

Tilt to the right

The N&O did that just in case its most devoted readers wouldn’t understand why “conservative talk radio” needs to be shackled by the Big Brother hand of Big Government.

The N&O follows it subhead with:

Talk radio contains 10 times as much conservative talk as liberal talk, according to a study released last month by The Center for American Progress, a research and educational institute that works for "progressive and pragmatic solutions," and Free Press, a group that focuses on media competitiveness.

The report, "The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio," found that among the 257 news-talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners, 91 percent of the talk was conservative and 9 percent was progressive. Ninety-two percent of the stations did not broadcast a single minute of liberal talk, according to the study.

These two paragraphs are worth a closer look, as is the rest of the N&O’s spin story.

I’ll do that when I post again on this story tomorrow.

In the meantime, two things:

1) You can read the rest of the N&O's story here and draw your own conclusions;

2) Unless you’re a “devoted N&O reader,” you’re surely smart enough to know I’m going to start out tomorrow exposing the N&O’s use of “progressive” in place of “liberal” or “leftist.”

I hope you’re back tomorrow.