Progressive Fairness Doctrine Tutorial

Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was recently paid $20,000 by Virginia Tech to tell the students that there aren’t two sides to the global warming debate and that the problem with the media today is that we don’t have a fairness doctrine. Those positions, which sound contradictory, betray the modern liberal agenda. They want to bring back the fairness doctrine not to ensure true fairness and balance in journalism but to intimidate and censor those expressing a view contrary to their own.

“The decline in the American journalism began in 1988 when Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine,” Kennedy said, according to the student paper, the Collegiate Times. The paper said Kennedy had complained about the American people being exposed to “right-winged news.” Here, he said, man-made global warming is referred to by the media as a “theory” when he claimed it is established fact. In foreign countries, he suggested, there is only one point of view—the truth, as he sees it. One can only conclude that Kennedy wants the Fairness Doctrine back to prevent right-wingers on talk radio and in cable news from voicing any doubts about the theory.

With these comments, Kennedy exposed the real agenda of the radical left. They don’t want the media to present both sides. They want the media to report their point of view, and only their point of view. Despite his complaints, it is a fact that Kennedy’s viewpoint is so widely accepted by the media that even the “conservative” Fox News Channel hired him as a special correspondent to do a November 2005 special program on global warming. It was completely one-sided in favor of the Kennedy position and conservatives, including those from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, led the criticism. Kennedy said that he personally convinced Fox News chairman Roger Ailes to air the program and that they had been friends for years. Eventually, Fox aired another program expressing some doubts about the man-made global warming theory.

Cliff Kincaid is the editor of Accuracy in Media’s AIM Report. This article is excerpted from an aim special report. You can find the complete report at www.aim.org.