Columnist: 'Fairness Doctrine' should include NPR, PBS

From out hypocritical liberals file, we find this excellent op-ed by L. Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center.

Writing in Investor's Business Daily, Bozell wants to know why liberals are working feverishly to impose the "fairness doctrine" on conservative talk radio when the far-left has two government-supported institutions all to itself.

From Bozell's column:

There's a huge hole in all of the public discussion about the reimposition of a "Fairness Doctrine" or a return to "localism" on the talk-radio format: What about National Public Radio (NPR)?

Liberals would like to "crush Rush" and his conservative compatriots by demanding each station balance its lineup ideologically. But since when has NPR ever felt any pressure to be balanced, even when a majority of taxpayers being forced to subsidize it are center-right?

Why no Fairness Doctrine attention to NPR? It is because those preaching "fairness" on the radio are hypocrites.

It's only "inserting politics" when anyone bothers to object to the everyday liberal politics of NPR and PBS. Ever since Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the nation's taxpayer-funded news outlets have operated free of any real fear that someone would disturb their pattern of putting their big broadcasting thumb on the scale of liberalism.

If NPR's drawing a Limbaugh-sized audience, isn't it time someone started asking why a "Fairness Doctrine" shouldn't apply to them?

Read the full column at the IBD Web site.