What A Surprise! The Fairness Doctrine's Hidden History

I don't always trust WorldNetDaily, but this doesn't surprise me much:

According to a Heritage Foundation report, President Richard Nixon, facing a hostile press, began a systematic campaign of harassment of radio and TV stations considered unfriendly to his administration.

But Nixon hardly invented the idea of using the Fairness Doctrine to stifle debate and criticism of government policies.

Bill Ruder, an assistant secretary of commerce in President John F. Kennedy's administration, candidly recalled the way the doctrine was used in the early 1960s.

"We had a massive strategy to use the fairness doctrine to challenge and harass the right-wing broadcasters, and hope the challenge would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue," he explained in Fred Friendly's 1976 book, "The Good Guys, the Bad Guys and the First Amendment."

That strategy was developed in 1962 when Kennedy's plans for approval of a nuclear test ban treaty by the U.S. Senate were facing sustained attack from opposition broadcasters.

The Citizens Committee for a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, established and funded by the Democrats, began demanding free reply time under the Fairness Doctrine any time a broadcaster denounced the treaty. The campaign was successful. The Senate overwhelmingly ratified the treaty.

In the 1964 presidential campaign, President Lyndon Johnson and his Democratic machine prepared a kit explaining "how to demand time under the Fairness Doctrine." The campaign produced 1,035 letters to stations and 1,678 hours of free air time for the Democrats, playing, in the eyes of the practitioners, no small part in Johnson's landside defeat of Sen. Barry Goldwater.

In a confidential report to the Democratic National Committee, Martin Firestone, a Washington attorney and former Federal Communication Commission staffer, explained: "The right-wingers operate on a strictly cash basis and it is for this reason that they are carried by so many small stations. Were our efforts to be continued on a year-round basis, we would find that many of these stations would consider the broadcasts of these programs bothersome and burdensome (especially if they are ultimately required to give us free time) and would start dropping the programs from their broadcast schedule."

The Democrats haven't changed much in four decades--still committed to indirect censorship to get their way.