As Reason‘s Jesse Walker notes, the Barack Obama campaign has publicly promised not to reimpose the Fairness Doctrine on broadcaster. We look forward to helping make sure Obama keeps that promise. Unfortunately, the Fairness Doctrine is just the beginning of Obama’s speech regulating agenda:
There’s a host of other broadcast regulations that Obama has not foresworn. In the worst-case scenario, they suggest a world where the FCC creates intrusive new rules by fiat, meddles more with the content of stations’ programs, and uses the pending extensions of broadband access as an opportunity to put its paws on the Internet. At a time when cultural production has been exploding, fueled by increasingly diverse and participatory new media, we would be stepping back toward the days when the broadcast media were a centralized and cozy public-private partnership.
