Tag Archives: Ajit Pai

Common Sense From The Wall Street Journal

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The Daily Caller is reporting today that The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board supports the repeal of the “net neutrality” rules that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) put into effect in 2015. I am the first person to admit that I do not understand the concept of net neutrality, but generally anything that interferes with the free market is not a good idea.

The article reports the correct way to deal with this issue:

The National Review also endorsed Pai’s (Ajit Pai, Chairman of the FCC) decision, specifically saying that Congress, not an independent federal agency, should consider rules through legislation to help solve any potential issues.

“If Congress wants net neutrality, then Congress can pass a law and let the FCC enforce it. It isn’t up to the FCC to create sweeping new policy on its own,” the editorial board for the National Review wrote Wednesday. “That kind of lawlessness ran rampant in the Obama administration, and the Trump administration is undertaking important work in undoing it, from the FCC to the EPA.”

We need to get to the point where Congress (elected by the people) makes the laws. Unelected officials should not be making laws.

Big Brother Has Plans To Get Bigger

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On February 10, The Wall Street Journal posted an article by Ajit Pai about a proposed Federal Communications Commission (FCC) initiative.

The article reports:

Last May the FCC proposed an initiative to thrust the federal government into newsrooms across the country. With its “Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs,” or CIN, the agency plans to send researchers to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run. A field test in Columbia, S.C., is scheduled to begin this spring.

The purpose of the CIN, according to the FCC, is to ferret out information from television and radio broadcasters about “the process by which stories are selected” and how often stations cover “critical information needs,” along with “perceived station bias” and “perceived responsiveness to underserved populations.”

The FCC has a list of questions for station managers, news directors, journalists, television anchors and on-air reporters. Those questions deal with the ‘news philosophy’ of the station and how the station ensures that the community gets crucial information. Answering the questions is supposedly voluntary, but the FCC is in charge of renewing the station’s license every eight years, so it is in the station’s best interest to answer the questions.

The article also reports:

The FCC says the study is merely an objective fact-finding mission. The results will inform a report that the FCC must submit to Congress every three years on eliminating barriers to entry for entrepreneurs and small businesses in the communications industry.

This claim is peculiar. How can the news judgments made by editors and station managers impede small businesses from entering the broadcast industry? And why does the CIN study include newspapers when the FCC has no authority to regulate print media?

The bottom line here is that this is a really bad idea. It is an interference with the free press, which used to be considered unconstitutional.

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