Thursday, February 20, 2014

Obama Administration’s Plan to Study Newsrooms Is Drawing Plenty of Public Opposition


Will journalists tell the FCC it's none of its business how they cover the news? - Mark Tapscott/Washington Examiner

Lots of bad things happen when a constitutionally-limited national government is transformed into a Nanny State Leviathan.

But one of the worst is when federal bureaucrats — apparently convinced that the rest of us are too stupid to figure it out for ourselves — decide to conduct a "Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs."

What that means is, as FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, the bureaucrats will:

"Ferret out information from television and radio broadcasters about 'the process by which stories are selected' and how often stations cover 'critical information needs,' along with 'perceived station bias' and 'perceived responsiveness to underserved populations.'"

A plan by the Federal Communications Commission to study how news organizations select stories has prompted about 10,000 people to sign a petition saying “no government monitors in newsrooms.” - The Blaze

That’s according to the American Center for Law and Justice, which announced the petition Wednesday and said it reached that number within the first two hours.

The agency announced a Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs last year, explaining that it wanted to understand the process of which stories are selected, station priorities, content production, populations served, perceived station bias, and perceived percent of news dedicated to each of the “critical information needs” (CINs) in a community, Fox News reported.

But Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the ACLJ, a conservative legal group, worries it could be used to intimidate certain news organizations into covering issues that government officials feel are important.

“This is an extremely troubling and dangerous development that represents the latest in an ongoing assault on the Constitution by the Obama Administration,” Sekulow said in a statement. “We have seen a corrupt IRS unleashed on conservatives. We have seen an imperial president bypass Congress and change the law with executive orders.”

The FCC only has jurisdiction over the broadcast industry, and not over cable news or print publications. So networks, local stations as well as most radio stations would be subject to the evaluation.

“Now we see the heavy hand of the Obama administration poised to interfere with the First Amendment rights of journalists,” Sekulow continued. “It’s clear that the Obama administration is only interested in utilizing intimidation tactics – at the expense of Americans and the Constitution. The federal government has no place attempting to control the media, using the unconstitutional actions of repressive regimes to squelch free speech.”