Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Brian Anderson, author of South Park Conservatives, Democratic Capitalism and its Discontents, and co-author with the Progress and Freedom Foundation's Adam Thierer of the new book, A Manifesto for Media Freedom.
FP: Brian Anderson, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Anderson: Thanks very much, Jamie—I’m always glad to visit, and Adam and I appreciate the interest in our new book.
FP: What inspired you to write this book?
Anderson: A sense of growing concern that the Left—with some help from a handful of Republicans—is keen on shushing right-of-center political speech. America in 2008 enjoys a remarkable, historically unprecedented abundance of new and old media outlets for obtaining news, information, and entertainment—something we celebrate as “the media cornucopia.” Think about it: newspapers (still) and magazines (more in existence than ever before); radio and television both broadcast and cable and satellite; DVDs; and of course the wild, dazzling, endlessly mutating Internet. As I argued in an earlier book, South Park Conservatives, this cornucopia has allowed viewpoints long downplayed or excluded in the mainstream, including conservative and libertarian ideas, to get a much wider public hearing, especially via political talk radio and the blogosphere.
Many people—incumbent politicians in general, but above all the political Left—hate this profusion and are keen to contain it, pare it back, get rid of it. Our book documents the most dangerous regulatory measures being brewed up in Washington, or already in place, to do this: a new Fairness Doctrine, or regulatory analogue; “network neutrality”; and the extension of campaign finance restrictions to cover media. The book tries to alert Americans to a danger to their political liberties and explain, in a clear a way as possible, the way complex media regulations work in practice in ways that have profound political implications.
FP: Can you expand a bit on the most dangerous regulatory measures being brewed up in Washington? And kindly crystallize a bit more what some of the profound political implications are.
Anderson: To get a sense of what the environment would be like for conservatives in the media in a Left-run Washington, it’s worth noting what the Obama campaign has already been doing—going after stations that ran anti-Obama NRA ads, implying that they may have violated their public-interest obligations; using its “action wire” twice to sic its activists on a Chicago radio station that dared have on authors exploring Obama’s political past in the city, with said activists bombarding the station with rage-filled calls and e-mails, denouncing it for violating the “public airwaves” and making the shows more difficult to conduct. Expect a lot, lot more of that, with the biggest effort aimed at using regulations on content grounds—pursuing greater “fairness,” “public obligations,” “local content”--to remake the landscape of AM radio, so that conservatives, who dominate it today, have much less influence.
FP: Why did the Left have a stranglehold over news and opinion outlets for so long?
Anderson: To hazard a guess: partly the small number of outlets; partly the rise of a certain ideal of journalism in the wake of Watergate that appealed to people with left-wing leanings—the reporter wouldn’t just report the news but be someone who “raised consciousness”; partly that such people, as they came to dominate newsrooms, hired those of like mind. But the Right also has not much emphasized the creation and cultivation of journalists who might ask different questions than the typical liberal press person—a big mistake, in my view.
FP: Expand on this mistake by the Right. This has something to do with Conservatives being unsuccessful in fighting political war, yes?
Anderson: If the only journalists, with some notable exceptions (some of the best writing for the magazine I edit, City Journal and others at work in the right-of-center blogosphere), have liberal politics, as survey after survey has shown, it invariably will tilt the news coverage Left—simply by the kinds of things reported on. Just look at how the MSM has ignored or downplayed Obama’s history and scoured Alaska for every shred of incriminating information it could dredge up on Sarah Palin.
FP: What explains the rise of the new media? In what ways has it been effective? For instance, you describe our current media environment as a cornucopia--a golden age. Why?
Anderson: The rise of new media has of course been driven by technological transformations, which, by lowering barriers to entry, have made it easier for every American to get his or her voice out there, especially on the Web. But the incredible success of blogs and websites, on all sides of the political spectrum, as well as cable news and talk radio, which have been dominated by the Right, has also shown a vast public thirst for new sources of information and opinion.
As we argue in the book, becoming an informed citizen has never been easier. You can get up in the morning and read your local paper and several national ones; walk to the newsstand and pick up everything from the Nation to National Review to City Journal to New Left Review; flick on the tube and watch Fox, CNN, BBC, C-SPAN, community access shows; and listen to myriad political talk programs; and surf the Internet, checking out the inexhaustible stream of political information and opinion from RealClearPolitics, say, or read about the campus battle against tenured radicals on Frontpage, or—well, you get the picture. The same kind of cornucopia prevails when it comes to our entertainment choices.
Old media outlets—many of the big liberal daily newspapers and weeklies, the network broadcasts—have been the losers, in that they’ve lost a lot of their market share. The new media have been effective at reducing the influence of the mainstream outlets, and—from a conservative perspective--countering the liberal biases of big media, as many well-known incidents attest.
Still, the New York Times, in particular, remains a powerful, agenda-driving institution, in part through its massive web presence.
FP: How is the Left coping and dealing with the new media’s success? How is it threatening the new media?
Anderson: Liberal media critics make two very different kinds of arguments. One current of argument says that the diversity of contemporary media is a myth; the reality is an ever-more-corporate and controlled media that drives its own agenda--one most definitely not in the public interest. This, we show in our book, is absurd. There are more owners and outlets in media markets today than in the past, and that’s not including the Internet, where, again, anyone with talent (and many without) can find an audience. And the media options represent as wide a diversity of worldviews as one could imagine.
The second argument is exactly contrary: that there are so many media choices that the variety becomes disorienting and alienating—undermining the sense of communal values necessary for democratic flourishing. We believe this a greatly exaggerated worry, made far less of a problem by the emergence of filtering sites and services that Chris Anderson writes about with such intelligence in his book, The Long Tail. Was America really better off when everyone got their news from one of the big networks or Time?
Some on the Left have embraced new media, though, and when campaign finance regulations have threatened the Internet, they've put themselves on the right, free-speech side.
FP: The Democrats want to restore a fairness doctrine--what were things like when the FCC enforced "balance" on the airwaves?
Anderson: We run through the history and it isn’t pretty. The mandate that all broadcasters offer a fair balance of alternative views, subject to potential fines or even loss of license if they didn’t, put government regulators in the role of speech monitors. A host that talked about politics on air could face Federal Communications Commission investigation—and then the station would have to have lawyers on hand; pour over tapes of the broadcasters, to see if one position enjoyed favor over another; and put together massive documentation. The incentive was to muzzle controversial talk—keep things as mild and inoffensive as possible. The existence of the regulation was also an invitation to political abuse, and we describe how both the Kennedy and Nixon administrations went after their political critics by ginning up Fairness Doctrine complaints against them.
The existence of the Fairness Doctrine, which was in place officially from the late 1940s through the mid-eighties, when Ronald Reagan’s FCC phased it out, made political talk radio in today’s boisterous, opinionated sense impossible—no Mark Levins, that’s for sure. And that’s what would happen if, as Democrats from Nancy Pelosi to John Kerry to Al Gore hope, the doctrine gets re-imposed. This is a missile aimed at conservative talk radio. A station that ran Levin, or Bill Bennett or Hugh Hewitt, would have to broadcast a liberal alternative—but liberals have tanked on the radio, for various reasons, including the fact that they’re so well represented elsewhere in the media. The station would most likely just say, you know what, we’re going to change formats and do sports talk or entertainment reporting—anything but politics!
But even if Democrats failed to bring back the Fairness Doctrine—and Obama claims not to support the idea, though virtually every leading Democrat, including Nancy Pelosi does—other reforms are likely: tightened media ownership regulations and an expansion of public interest duties of broadcasters, including imposing greater local accountability on them. This means forcing stations to carry more local programming, even if the public isn’t asking for it—which it isn’t. This is aimed at national syndicators who make conservative shows available across the country.
FP: Can you explain what "network neutrality"--you call it network socialism--is and why we should care about it?
Anderson: Network neutrality is the idea that every bit of information surging through the Internet’s “pipes” has to be treated equally—that Web providers aren’t allowed, say, to offer ultra-fast service to those sites or users willing to pay extra, just like FedEx speeds up packages or a fee, or to manage their service in other active ways. This idea makes no economic sense. Why should providers keep building twenty-first century networks if they won’t be able to provide new services that might help them recoup their considerable investments? Much of what net neutrality would outlaw is simply good management of a limited resource. Why shouldn’t Internet providers be able to slow down the service of the guy downloading 10 massive movies so that the casual e-mailer can send a swift message? Proponents of net neutrality say that the Internet will become a walled-off garden, with providers blocking sites they don't like or otherwise restricting content. But this gets the incentives wrong--the Web is all about content, and a provider that restricted content would soon find customers jumping to a competitor.
The bigger worry is that enforced neutrality will extend government regulation of the Internet and be a slippery slope toward some kind of fairness mandates extended to online opinion sites, too, as the FCC commissioner Robert McDowell recently warned. This isn’t as far-fetched as one might think—the European Union has been looking at applying fairness requirements to opinion websites, for instance, and the influential law professor Cass Sunstein, who advises Democrats on regulatory and legal issues, has in the past argued for mandatory “electronic sidewalks” that would accompany every partisan website, giving the other side.
FP: Overall, what do you think is new and fresh about your book and what do you hope it will achieve?
Anderson: I think our book is the first to explain, in as clear and systematic a way as possible, the extent of the threat to political speech being cooked up in Washington as we do this interview—and with the prospect of an Obama presidency and a Democratic Congress, the time is now to understand what’s at stake and fight back. It is also encourages conservatives to embrace media freedom rather than pursue their own regulatory crusades on things like cleaning up cable television. The Right has benefited hugely from the proliferation of outlets and media in recent years and should recognize that fact.
FP: Brian Anderson, thank you for joining us.
Anderson: My pleasure, Jamie—thanks for having me by.