Bias Bill?
Jeff details one of the dumbest ideas I’ve seen:
In the wake of CBS News’ “60 Minutes” controversy, an influential Republican on Tuesday said he wants to convene a Capitol Hill hearing on TV news operations after the Nov. 2 election.
Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), chair of the House Commerce Committee, told a meeting of the TV engineering trade group MSTV in Washington that broadcast network news divisions “need to have safeguards to prevent reporters from infusing their opinions into news reports.”
The lawmaker said he wanted to hear from execs of all the nets — not just CBS — and threatened to introduce legislation requiring TV news operations to impose safeguards against partisan bias seeping into reports. He backed off the threat of legislation when pressed for specifics.
There’s a fine line between regulating bias (think of the bloggers that will be out of work!) and outright limits on free speech. Actually, I kid. There’s no fine line. An attempt to regulate bias would be an blatant violation of free speech protections.
Additionally, how the hell do you measure bias?
September 29th, 2004 at 1:05 pm
As far as I know the news outlets are private enterprise and as such can be as biased as they like. The problem is that their work is fraudulent since they try to tell us that they are objective in their reporting.
We all know they are biased, so I don’t watch that crap anymore. The blogosphere is my main source of info now.
September 29th, 2004 at 1:41 pm
i agree with you say uncle,
September 30th, 2004 at 1:25 pm
How do you measure bias? Why, with a voltmeter, of course.
September 30th, 2004 at 5:00 pm
Thib, at this point I’d prefer to use a Hi-Pot tester. On Rather’s genitals.