Obama’s FCC, liberal churches, and the “media justice” mob
My syndicated column today (reprinted below) probes the FCC/left-wing church alliance to silence conservative critics of illegal immigration through “hate speech” regulation. Tip of the iceberg.
Jeffrey Lord at the American Spectator first broke the story of how United Church of Christ officials met with kindred spirit/FCC Commissioner Michael Copps earlier this month before launching a nationwide campaign to pressure the FCC to crack down on cable TV and talk radio figures.
The motto of the “So We Might See” anti-”hate speech” campaign is: “Without media justice, there will be no social justice!” The same Marx-loving “social justice” crowd is behind the “media justice” mob — including George Soros’s Open Society Institute, Media Democracy Fund, and Media Matters; the Ford Foundation; the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; etc., etc., etc. Their goal: government redistribution of media wealth. As “The Media Justice Fund” put it: The movement “is grounded in the belief that social and economic justice will not be realized without the equitable redistribution and control of media and communication technologies.” And there’s that phrase “transformative change” again:
* Media change of all kinds must expose and directly confront the mechanics of structural racism and systemic oppression.
* Leaders from historically marginalized communities must be developed as effective media activists and strategic movement communicators.
* Media policy advocacy and strategic communications are more effective when clearly relevant to the primary justice issues of the movement for racial justice, economic and gender equity, and youth rights.
* Compelling communications and media activism campaigns must be both rooted in critical issues and coordinated across issue, sector, and region for national impact.
* When justice sectors strengthen communications strategies, center the use of culture as a communications tool, employ winning frames and messages, and strengthen their influence over media rules and rights, the possibilities for transformative change skyrocket.
“Transformative change” = a media landscape purged of the Right’s most powerful voices.
The White House communications shop gives two thumbs up, no doubt.
***
How the FCC and liberal churches are scheming to shut you up
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009
The war on conservative speech has moved from the White House to your neighborhood pews. Left-wing church leaders want the Federal Communications Commission to crack down on “hate speech” over cable TV and right-leaning talk radio airwaves. President Obama’s speech-stifling bureaucrats seem all too happy to oblige.
Over the past week, an outfit called “So We Might See” has conducted a nationwide fast to protest “media violence” – specifically, “anti-immigrant hate speech, which employs flawed arguments to appeal to fears rather than facts.” Their ire is currently aimed at Fox News and conservative talk show giants. But how long before they target ordinary citizens who call in to complain about the government’s systemic refusal to enforce federal sanctions on illegal alien employers or the bloody consequences of lax deportation policies?
The “interfaith coalition for media justice” is led by the United Church of Christ. Yes, that’s the same church of Obama’s race-baiting, Jew-bashing ex-pastor Jeremiah Wright. Other members include the Presbyterian News Service, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and the National Council of Churches. (The US Conference of Catholic Bishops has denied being a part of the campaign, despite being listed as a coalition member. So has the Methodist church.) These religious liberals have partnered with the National Hispanic Media Coalition, which filed a petition in January demanding that the FCC collect data, seek public comment, and “explore options” for combating “hate speech” from staunch critics of illegal immigration.
Open-borders groups have sought to marginalize, criminalize, and demonize those of us who have raised our voices for years about lax immigration enforcement — and to impose an Orwellian Fairness Doctrine-style policy on illegal alien amnesty opponents. During the presidential campaign, the National Council of La Raza launched a “We Can Stop the Hate” project to redefine tough policy criticism from the Right as “hate.” La Raza president Janet Murguia called for TV networks to keep immigration enforcement proponents off the airwaves and argued that hate speech should not be tolerated, “even if such censorship were a violation of First Amendment rights,” according to the NYTimes.
Now, the gag-wielders have a friend in the White House – and they won’t let him forget it. Their FCC petition calling for a crackdown on illegal immigration critics cites Obama’s own words in a fall 2008 speech to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Obama told his amnesty-supporting audience that he knew they were “counting on us to stop the hateful rhetoric filling the airwaves.”
Unsurprisingly, far Left billionaire George Soros’s money is backing the “So We Might See”/National Hispanic Media Coalition effort. And remember that the Soros-funded Center for American Progress has provided the Obama White House with its Fairness Doctrine-embracing “diversity czar,” Mark Lloyd.
Last week, United Church of Christ officials met privately with Obama FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps in advance of the “So We Might See” campaign. Copps then delivered a lecture at the UCC’s Riverside Church in New York City, expressing solidarity with the liberal church leaders’ goals and egging the congregants to take action on “media reform: ”We are taking huge risks with our democracy. We need to change that and we need to do it now. We need to get a grip on what’s happening and we need to fix it.”
Jeffrey Lord, who happens to belong to the United Church of Christ, reported in the American Spectator that not long after that speech, the UCC sent out a mass e-mail to its millions of members urging them to join the nationwide fast and regulatory drive. The church-state alliance missive directed its followers: “As a participant, you will be asked to sign a petition to the Federal Communications Commission asking that it open a notice of inquiry into hate speech in the media.”
No word on when they’ll be launching an inquiry into the fear-based, fact-free “hate speech” from the mouth of Florida Democrat Rep. Alan Grayson, who accused Republicans of wanting sick patients to “die quickly,” likened health care problems to the “Holocaust,” and attacked an adviser to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as a “K Street whore.”
Or when they’ll be going after MSNBC and Air America radio hate-mongers who have openly wished on their airwaves for the deaths of George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck.
But I digress. In the age of Obama, the targets of left-wing hate speech don’t have a prayer.
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Video included it’s pretty good, Imus this morning.
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/jeff-poor/2009/10/28/imus-rants-about-his-fox-critics-calls-obama-whiny-little-titty-baby-girl
What else does the party of love and tolerance not want us to tolerate? I wish they would publish a complete list so we can know what we should and should not tolerate. It’s getting confusing.
For example, they want tolerance for a child rapist and yet demand hatred for a group of lacrosse players falsely accussed of rape. They request tolerance for Muslims who express the desire to behead Christians, but then spew hatred and ridicule against Christians who want to protect the innocent unborn. They are adamant that foreign terrorists be given full constitutional rights, but right-wing “extremists” need to be silenced “even if such censorship were a violation of First Amendment rights.”
It’s not logical, so I just need a list to tell me who I can hate and who I must tolerate. Is that too much to ask?
But they’re liberal, so it’s okay. Didn’t you get the memo on this?
This is simple. Just think of the most thin-skinned person on the planet, and whatever would offend him/her (might be transgendered, so we have to be careful, lest we offend!) is verboten. Bashing Christians and conservatives, however, is always okay.
Sorry Kingfish, I got my Joan Jett all mixed up with my Suzy Quattro! The smell of burning leather gets my synapse all phreniated!
So, which czar gets to decide what constitutes “hate speach”? If someone gets their feelers hurt, can they call the cops and say it is a “hate speach” crime? Is asking the wrong question of Dede going to be “hate speach”?
Personally, I will take YHWH up on His word. If that offends – GOOD! If shifting baselines means killing babies is okay today but saying sodomy is wrong tomorrow is a good thing – send me to jail now as I am going to call out from the roof tops:
“Abortion takes a life and is wrong. Sodomy is wrong!
“Hello officer. You are here to arrest me for hate speach? Did you know our neighbor has a meth lab? Oh, you are not here for that – I see.”
YHWH promised in the end:
Good = bad
Bad = good
Prophecy unfolding before our very eyes.
Bravo!
Biblically Correct, Not Politically Correct…
Biblically Correct, Not Politically Correct…
There was a time when Biblically Correct WAS Politically Correct…
there was no difference between the two.
The same state that now sends Barney Frank to Congress would have found him guilty of a capital offense when that state was a colony…
The 1672 General Laws and Liberties of the Massachusets Colony:
Compare that to the “Hate Crime” legislation Obama just signed.
From one extreme to the other.
Now, before any lib accuses me, I am NOT calling for vigilante killing of homosexuals. I AM truthfully reporting what the Bible says, what the law in Colonial Mass. said, and discussing the “Hate Crimes” legislation Obama just signed.
Those who used to be considered, by both God’s law (the Bible) and man’s law, of being guilty of a capital offense (homosexuality), are now lifted up by man’s law, while those who continue to lift up God’s law are now increasingly considered criminals by man’s law.
I’m pretty sure this particular “hate crimes” piece will face a challenge in the court.
Wow. That means SOOOOO much coming from an organization named “The Race”…cough, sigh.
PS. Interestingly, Google language tools used to kick up the exact and correct translation; it no longer does. Things that make you go “Hmmmmmmm”.
I wrote to the USCCB yesterday and lodged a complaint against their involvement with this Soros funded outfit.
Got a canned response that they did not sign the petition but that they share So That We Might See’s commitments to ‘improving access to broadband to the under-served, “reducing violence in all media”, and reducing the excess of advertising in children’s programming”.
I wrote back that surely the USCCB could do well on their own to strike out against these most pressing, most urgent issues, than to piggy back on some Soros funded front group for silencing talk radio?
I’m going to be on the USCCB like white on rice.
Uh, that’s what Sotomayor was chosen for. Get your mind right man!
Mattm – good clarification and expansion. By all means donate if the circumstances warrant. Upkeep for the church, feeding the local poor, etc. But if you disagree with the UCC’s actions here, you have to make it painfully clear to your pastor that you expect an accounting for any monies you donate, ensuring that they aren’t supporting what amounts to a lobby. A lobby that you disagree with.
I hate the term “hate speech.” I think it is one of the most insidious attacks on the First Amendment we have ever witnessed.
And, of course, President Chauncey thinks it’s just swell.
There is no such thing as hate speech. There is slander and there is libel, but “hate speech?” Sorry. You’ll find a real leprechaun before you’ll find hate speech.
Consider:
What if I said that a whole group of people are bad because they tolerate and even endorse suicide bombings, premeditated attacks on civilians, etc.? I paint the whole group as being evil, on average, because of this. I mock their god, and I mock their claims of being “peaceful.”
Based on my claims, I call for their expulsion from the United Nations. I call for a boycott on them, and even for rounding them up here in the United States and forcing them to watch Madonna video’s until they confess their evil ways.
The only question that anyone has to ask is: can I back up my claims with facts?
If I can, then it’s not hate speech. It’s political discussion, and it it 100% protected by the First Amendment. It is, in fact, WHY the First Amendment was written. I have the RIGHT to call the king a fink, or bad people bad, with no fear of repercussion…
…unless, of course, I’m lying.
If you can prove that what I am saying or writing is FALSE, and that I knew or reasonably SHOULD know, then it’s not protected. It’s slander or libel, and you have all sorts of ways to make me (a) stop, and (b) pay for it.
People who needs more than these rights and protections are worthless and weak – unable to fight fairly in a free society, and looking for an unfair protection to enable their own weaknesses.
On October 29th, 2009 at 9:59 am, RobM1981 said:
Hater.
RobM1981,
I actually agree with you 100%
Is this “hate speech”?
Will those who promote “hate speech” laws say that this is “hate speech”? Of course not.
I don’t promote calling this “hate speech”, but I do promote calling it TREASON. And it needs to be dealt with as such. We used to hang people for treason. Try him, and if found guilty, put him to death. We either take out those who are guilty of treason, or they will take down this country.