Submitted by Charles Pedrick, Jul 16, 2007 11:45

Because Fred Thompson does not appear in Law and Order reruns as a political candidate, the " Equal Airtime Rule " must be deemed not only inapplicable, but unconstitutional. Any Big Government attempt to equidistribute airtime would, in this case amount to nothing other than censorship of the networks, a clear and obvious First Amendment violation. In other words, because in electoral politics, familiarity might breed success, what the FCC would be attempting to do is moderate the " familiarity factor, " but by entering into a free market, attempting to influence that market. I wouldn't want to call it a communist tactic, but it certainly qualifies as socialist. They wouldn't be entering into that free market with tanks.

Let us not forget that Fred Thompson also appeared in Die Hard II, which would almost instantaneously, if the public was truly that naive, establish his credibility in terms of counterterrorism or the ability to " lead with a steady hand. " One would tend to assume that the public is not in fact, that naive, and yet, what percentage of the public still maintains that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction ? The disambiguation of fact and fiction is truly an arduous and sometimes thankless task. But democracy relies on the idea that people might actually engage that task, maybe even right after a Law and Order rerun. If one of the purposes of law is the discernment of truth, then certainly witnessing such a process might actually bear its likeness in those entertaining the witnessing.

Clearly, the message that the FCC would send is that because the public is incapable of discerning truth, particularly in what has become, post-9/11, the abyss of the surreal, like good parents adept at activating locks and filters, and for fear that the Fred Thompson we saw in Die Hard II would be confused with the real Fred Thompson, a longtime legislator, it must control that to which the public is exposed. Again, the notion of state-run medis borders on Stalinistic.

My view is, let the states decide for themselves. Better yet, why not allow people to decide whether or not they want to watch a Law and Order rerun in which Fred might be featured. If people actually decide against it on the basis of a political campaign, or even Fred's redstate status, then so be it. If people are actually able to separate the real Fred from his movie and TV persona, even though the two might be similar, there could still be hope for self-government yet.

Truth be told, I still can't figure out how the FCC censored the end of Catfight within a span of less than 10 minutes, but of course, 9/11 could not be stopped by the FAA. People may argue that Catfight and 9/11 were different and could not actually occur in the same context, but to that I would retort that in the fact that they're both forms of speech, actually not, and to be fair, how do hijackers occur in the same context with strippers ?

Hopefully, contingent upon what the FCC decides, the networks would, in a worst-case scenario, file suit in Federal Court on First Amendment grounds.

One of the reasons why 9/11 happened is because Big Media failed to adequately report to the public how serious a threat we could be facing, at least after 1993. Hence, when media is censored, the effect can be catastrophic, even though violations of the First Amendment were not the only cause of 9/11. But practically speaking, without the media, nothing in government gets done. And because it's never been scientifically proven that erotic mudwrestling can harm the public, why the FCC would bother wasting public resources to " protect us " from that which remains, at least on some level, aesthetically appealing, even to the world's most insidious terrorists, while failing at the same time to adequately inform us for more than a decade of the acts those terrorists might pursue is, in the very least, perplexing. Would you rather Congress have spent public money to investigate who attacked the Trade Center in 1993, and Osama bin Laden was, to spare of the obvious confusion regarding who attacked the Trade Center in 2001, Saddam or Osama, or would you rather government waste money investigating what a President did in the Oval Office ? Had the Osama ordeal been adequately investigated and reported on by media, which would have been more journalistically responsible, rather than the Monica scandal, the Towers may never have fallen.

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