Plus Pages

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Meet The Man Who Wants To Control Your News

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps has a long history of advocating for government control of media, dating to the beginning of his tenure.

However, Mike Riggs at  dailycaller.com reports it wasn’t until last week, after Copps spoke to the BBC and an audience at Columbia University, that Congress decided to look into the commissioner’s philosophy against private media companies.

“We are going to be pretty close to denying our citizens the essential news and information that they need to have in order to make intelligent decisions about the future direction of their country,” Copps told the BBC. Media outlets are not “producing the body of news and information that democracy needs to conduct its civic dialogue.”

Copps went on to criticize his Republican colleagues at the FCC, who he claims, “eviscerated just about every public interest responsibility that generations of reformers had fought for and won in radio and TV.” In other words, the FCC folded the Fairness Doctrine in the 80s when it should have been cooking up legal justification for applying it more widely.

Read more here.

No comments:

Post a Comment