THE "UNFAIRNESS" DOCTRINE

Customers who peruse the Current Affairs section at a prominent Oceanside bookstore may be getting a preview of what access to contrary opinions will be like if the Obama Administration reinstitutes governmental regulation of radio broadcasts.

Whether a left-wing patron or some Obama-worshipping employee is responsible, I don’t know. What I do know is how frequently I find conservative books concealed behind leftist volumes or scattered about the shelves in alphabetical disarray.

My most recent visit to this establishment provided an egregious example of ideological rearrangement—with Bill O’Reilly’s mug obliterated by some “pinhead’s” oeuvre, Ann Coulter’s books given a minimum of semi-orderly exposure, and works by Bernard Goldberg, Dick Morris, and Newt Gingrich distributed across the a-to-z spectrum.

By contrast, a veritable shrine was devoted to publications by and about Barack Obama. (Mind you, this is the Current Affairs section, not the coffee table memorabilia shelf.)

Not surprisingly, the store didn’t have the book I was looking for—or perhaps it was in stock (as their computer indicated) but had been moved to an undisclosed location for politically incorrect titles.

The good news is that a same-brand store in Encinitas seemed to have a handle on things—with almost all Current Affairs material displayed in proper alphabetical order. There was a nice “Obama” section, but not one that dominated the racks. Furthermore, face-front displays seemed evenly divided between left and right opinion. Finally, the Encinitas store had the un-PC book that had apparently gone missing in Oceanside.

My “where’s Waldo” browsing experience foreshadows the difficulty most Americans will have gaining access to dissenting opinions if Obama’s leftist allies succeed in reimposing, either through the front or back door, the Orwellian-titled “Fairness Doctrine.”

It’s staggering to think that Democrat Senators like Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have expressed support for this Constitution-trampling relic of a world where electronic media outlets could be counted on one hand. But then leftist politicians tend toward a totalitarian mentality where opposition to their own thinking is denounced as “divisive” but a 24/7 attack machine on their side (replete with character, and real, assassination scenarios) is taken for granted.

Not content with the overwhelming left-wing bias of CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, Hollywood, Letterman, Leno, “Law and Order” and most of the nation’s major newspapers, Schumer and friends want to stifle opposition voices in the one medium where conservatives, by dint of commercial success, have achieved a modicum of balance in the total media universe.

While President Obama has said he opposes reinstituting the “Fairness Doctrine” (more honestly called The Anti-Limbaugh Democrat Enabling Act), FCC commissioner Robert McDowell warns that the policy will probably be rebranded and promoted in the name of localism and diversity—a likelihood reinforced by Attorney General Eric Holder’s evasive “Fairness Doctrine” responses to a Senate committee.

Under McDowell’s worst-case scenario, community advisory boards, filled with book-squelching ACORN activists, would determine whether Rick Roberts or Roger Hedgecock are serving what they conceive to be “the public interest.” For leftists, that’s “fairness.”