The Ministry of Information

 Mark this down in the one foot in the grave and another on a slippery rock category.

How much more Nazi/Soviet like are we going to let the Federal government get? The FCC intends to put overseers in newsrooms and TV studios across the country. In a move they say will put observers in the nation’s newsrooms in order to better understand “the process by which stories are selected.”

WTF? Seriously?

As if just having the presence of "government officials" looking over the shoulders of news directors and editors won't influence or alter what is disseminated as news. Do we have freedom of the press or not? We already have the NSA or Big Brother if you like collecting data on every single American. We will now have a Ministry of Information approving the news. When editors openly defy the Ministry will they find themselves subject to IRS audits?

Is this America?

*******************************************************

UPDATE * UPDATE* UPDATE

According to Adweek the FCC could be backing off it's plans (for now) after a piece in Wall Street Journal by Ajit Pai, a commissioner with the Federal Communications Commission, was highly critical of the agency's motives. For now the agency, according to an FCC representative "has no intention of interfering in the coverage and editorial choices that journalists make. We're closely reviewing the proposed research design to determine if an alternative approach is merited."

READ ON...

********************************************************

We already have a real problem with much of the mainstream media carrying the water for the current regime in the White House. There are already instances where the White House has not so secretly investigated journalists who challenged them (including illegal wire taps). Would you be surprised if these brave men and women had threats leveled against their families, veiled threats of course?

This is creepy, is it not? The FCC says this is merely the agency’s initiative to get to the bottom of the mystery of why television and radio broadcasters are not telling the story the federal government wants them to tell. Wow, simply wow. It's not the job of the free press to tell the stories the government wants told. Our founding father's are surely turning somersaults in their graves.

The FCC's premise:
(1) There is an identifiable set of basic information needs that individuals need met to navigate everyday life, and that communities need to have met in order to thrive; (2) Low income and some minority and marginalized communities within metropolitan and rural areas and areas that are “lower-information” areas are likely to be systematically disadvantaged in both personal and community opportunities when information needs lag or go unmet; and (3) Information goods are public goods; the failure to provide them is, in part, a market failure.”

Essentially they intend to couch this invasive exercise in the language of fairness by implying that the disadvantaged are not getting information needed for the public good. Let's not beat around the bush anymore, censorship is on the way. Free people should be outraged.

 In this quote from the FCC's website we get a lesson in pure gobbledygook:
"From this exercise, as well as the preceding two years of discussions with national experts within the CPRN network and beyond, it became clear that an interdisciplinary framework such as the emerging communication ecological paradigm that analyzes the production and use of media and information holistically and that provides a more variegated, in depth understanding of categories of diversity of voices and participation within and across communities, lends itself particularly well to the set of questions posed by the FCC. It incorporates elements from a wide range of disciplines cited above, including economics; captures the interactive nature and complexities of demographic and information trends across the entire media ecosystem; and allows for a translation from the local community level to the national aggregate levels of data necessary for policy making."

The observation process alone will have a chilling affect on news broadcasting, it has to. Simply put the government is going to use these pointy nose overseers to ensure the public good is being served in every nook and cranny and I believe ultimately threaten to revoke the broadcast charters if it isn't.

The government could easily create it's own broadcasting companies to do this sort of thing and be perfectly within their rights to do so. Oh wait, they already have - it's called PBS and NPR. So this move is really to spook the private companies that make up the free press into toeing the government line. This is shameful.

My next question is why the silence from the mainstream media? If this was George W Bush's FCC there would be an uproar and rightly so. I goes back to my previous post: Who's gonna stop him? The press has made it's bed with the Obama regime and now they shall lie in it.

Ugh