Torching Ideas

I woke up too early this morning. I looked at the base of the night stand and saw my stack of books. Some half-read, a few unopened, one just finished. Mixed in are the kids books. And the magazines. We read.

A thought dashed through my mind. The crazy idea of regulating talk radio is akin to the Nazis burning books.

I am sure that anyone of a certain age in America has seen the grainy footage of book bonfires in Germany before World War Two. This is the point where their society and politics fully becomes a one party system.

While they are in fact burning books, they are also trying to remove thoughts and ideas from the library of existance.

In order to have the books in the first place, a few things have to happen. First, the society has to be wealthy enough to support writers. Second, the population has to purchase the books and read them. Unread books are not threatening.

The third element is that the folks in power have to be threatened by the ideas and concepts in the books. At that point, when burning the books you are symbollically torching the oppossed ideas.

What does this have to do with our current federal government and talk radio? Successful talk radio, mostly on the AM dial, is predominantly on the political right / conservative side.

There is liberal talk radio in America. It has been wildly unsuccessful on AM radio. It appears that conservatives listen to AM radio along with buying and reading books. Two uncool things to do.

Other than NPR, which is government funded, radio stations need to make money. Since liberal talk radio loses money, it is not on many stations.

Liberal ‘talk radio’ is all over television (CNN, CNBC, NBC, MSNBC, etc), all over the newspapers (NY Times, Washington Post, etc), almost every movie made, taught in schools and so on.

So the government, in ‘fairness’ has decided to ‘help’ the situation. They have an idea to instill fairness into the media. For the uninitiated, one would figure that if the only true conservative voice in America was on little old AM radio and that there is a lot to be done to make things fair.

You would have figured wrong.

Instead of evening up all the other mediums of communication, the government is going to attack AM radio for being unfair. AM radio has not gone along with liberal America. It is the last voice of reason (along with FOX News on cable tv).

To translate, attacking AM radio is the ‘burning books’ of our times.