Congressional Democrats are making noises about reinstating the so-called Fairness Doctrine -- that would force the nation's TV and radio broadcasters to make time for voices from both sides of controversial issues. Conservatives and Christians say the result would be anything but fair.
Rich Bott, president of Bott Radio Network, a group of Christian stations with more than 30 million listeners, said being forced to offer both sides on controversial issues would create a special problem for religious broadcasters.
"The definition of what is considered to be controversial today is just mind-boggling compared with what it was back in the 1980s," he said.
"For instance, today it is considered to be 'controversial' if a person says it is best for children to have both a mother and a father," Bott added. "It can also be argued that it is very controversial to say that Jesus is the only Way of Salvation -- or that homosexual behavior is a sin. So it would be difficult to hear a Bible-based sermon today that someone or some group didn’t feel was 'controversial.' "
Reps. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., and Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., are backing legislation to reverse a 1987 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decision that ended the Fairness Doctrine, a 1940s-era regulation that many broadcasters say had the real-world impact of chilling speech for the decades it was in effect.
Conservative talk-show hosts join Christian broadcasters in saying the measure is aimed directly at silencing them.
Rush Limbaugh called the efforts the "Hush Rush" campaign.
Glen Beck, who hosts a national radio show and a nightly program on CNN, told CitizenLink the goal is to "do what people have been trying to do for quite some time."
"If you want to kill talk radio, and you want to kill conservative opinion, the way to do it is through the Fairness Doctrine," he said. "It will destroy the business of radio."
National radio host Michael Medved called the attempt to resurrect the doctrine "an outrage."
"The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States does not protect obscenity," he said. "It does not protect pornography -- even the courts have established that. What the First Amendment of the United States protects is political speech.
"And the idea of the Fairness Doctrine of getting government officials to monitor and evaluate political speech is appalling -- and would bring us much closer to the kinds of limitations and restrictions on public discourse that exist in other nations around world -- which we should not emulate."
Medved said the Democrats are "feeling their oats."
"They are new in power," he said. "I think they recognize that radio shows like the Michael Medved Show or Focus on the Family represent a challenge and a change to their traditional dominance of major media."
Medved said most people have forgotten that when the Fairness Doctrine was in play, there was no political talk radio.
"If you had on an openly conservative talk show, you would have to balance it with an openly liberal show -- even if the one show got ratings, and the other didn't," Medved said.
That created a situation in which all radio hosts who talked about controversial issues "had to pretend" to be nonpartisan, he added.
"Those shows were inherently either dishonest or boring -- because nobody is up the middle about political issues," he said. "It is much more healthy for this republic for people to express points of view and then allow the marketplace to balance those points of view."
In the end, mainstream and Christian broadcasters are unanimous in maintaining that Americans want to hear a diversity of opinions -- and today's media environment has plenty of ideological diversity without the Fairness Doctrine.
As CNN's Beck put it: "If you don't like my message, go find (MSNBC's liberal host) Keith Olbermann. He's available."
(Paid for by Focus on the Family Action)
