Zogby asks if FCC should force "good white people" to "make room for more African-Americans and gays."
October 27, 2009 3:52 pm ET by Jamison Foser
FAIR's Peter Hart takes note of an extraordinary poll question asked by Zogby:
Here's one of the "questions" asked in the poll, tailor-made for Fox News Channel:
Federal Communications Commission Chief Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd wants the FCC to force good white people in positions of power in the broadcast industry to step down to make room for more African-Americans and gays to fill those positions. Do you agree or disagree that this presents a threat to free speech?
Wow. Just ... wow.
UPDATE: There's some understandable speculation in the comments that this is too awful to be true. Here's the poll, in PDF format.
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Sounds an awful lot like the "Obama thesis" hoax that burned Limbaugh last week.
When he says things like that, it becomes a fair question to ask. It appears to me that Lloyd needs to step down.
There are some very well thought out responses to this vile misrepresentation below, if you care to read on.
my take is the outrage should be directed toward lloyd, not zogby... yet another example of media matters trying to play the race card against an honest response to the person who dealt it in the first place...
reporting from murderland ranch,
i'm mookie von zipper
massmurdermedia
Is it possible that Zogby would totally discredit and humiliate itself in this way?
If so, Zogby might not be too happy about this. After all, it is a threat to his business. Perhaps Zogby's lawyers will have something to say about this?
Here it is on Fax news release. You need to read it all...
Who besides the goverment was he talking about here?
No, the poll question added to Lloyd's words, saying that he wants the FCC to impose this policy in order to force people out of their jobs.
Link Two
I'm happy to address the issue, highliter. I've done a little reading on this subject today, as it happens, and I'd be glad to provide some context about Mr. Lloyd and his views. I've provided a couple of links to follow, but feel free to do a little digging on your own.
As far as I understand the basic premise, we need to have a little history lesson. In the 1950s, America was very concerned with the 'red scare', convinced commies lurked around every corner ready to destroy America with their.. commie-ness. Then, in the '60s, there was something of a cultural revolution. This had a number of effects, but the most important for the topic under discussion was the rapidly growing diversity of radio and television.
There were two things pushing this. First, the FM band licenses exploded, offering many local opportunities for local stations to spring up and offer competition to the more entrenched AM band. Second, the TV revolution continued at an expanding pace, bringing the 'tube' into even more households.
The upshot was, by the 70s, considerable broadcast media diversity existed in the United States. In the 1980s, however, that changed. Reagan, and the Republican party, allowed the FCC to skip worrying about ascertainment, which requires station owners to canvas the community they serve to find out what interests them.
Determining that ascertainment was too great a regulatory burden for the FCC and station owners, the FCC under Reagan quit requiring it, and extended the length of license agreements, quit require public participation in license reviews, and allowed one person or corporation to own all the broadcast media in a given market.
With this top-down view of media, many local stations, both TV and radio, were purchased by conglomerates or corporations, who then provided en masse programming directed from the company headquarters. TV and radio lost most of it's 'local flavor' as content became dictated from the home office. Content that is typically heavily influenced by the major advertisers who make this whole system profitable.
Now, on to Mr. Lloyd's remarks. In the face of this loss of local opinion and voice, Mr. Lloyd has suggested that major corporations and conglomerates be divested of their radio and TV station holdings to the extent that there are opposing voices in all markets where this is possible. What does that mean? Well, for one thing, it means that a white national programming director of many stations may lose his job, but that this position will be filled by available local programming directors that more closely resemble the community in which the station exists.
Is he talking about walking into boardrooms, firing all the white employees, and forcibly replacing them with people of color, or different sexual orientation? No. He is pointing out the stranglehold that a very few men hold over far too much of our media, and is proposing returning to rules that encourage local stations to be locally owned and operated. Network affiliation will likely continue, of course, if only for news and prime time hours of operation, especially in the land of TV. However, it will not be nearly as easy to drive from New York to LA listening to the same program the entire way.
In return, we as a nation will have more and varied voices participating in debates over policy and human rights issues on the public airwaves, which is always a good thing. It is this diversity that can make us great as a nation. We currently have far too little of it from a media standpoint, in Mr. Lloyd's opinion, and, because he presents a convincing argument, my own as well.
Why do I suspect our troll didn't make it past the first paragraph?
All one has to do is look at our society and see who occupies the majority of powerful positions in institutions throughout our society, and you must conclude that it's a bit odd that in a multicultural society--with fewer whites than non-whites--that there are scarcely any people of color in control of powerful institutions. How can that be the result of a fair, color-blind system? It's like throwing a jar with a million white marbles and a million non-white marbles into the air, and when it hits the ground, all the white marbles end up on one side of the room and the non-whites on the other. If that were to happen, you'd have to suspect that there was something unnatural going on. Surely if there are no inherent differences between white and non-white marbles, we would expect that there would be a good mix of marbles all over the place!
Well, we're not seeing that in our society, and people like Lloyd are rightly asking why not, and what we can do about it. There's a structural imbalance that we can see and measure. When this imbalance is corrected, things are going to look differently than they do now. It's that simple. It's not about punishing white people; it's about confronting the forces that are creating this unnatural imbalance of power--an imbalance that we know is dangerous to the health and success of a society because we have seen it over an over again. It's one of the reasons we have given for going into Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere where certain groups and their voices have been unfairly stifled.
That any truly patriotic American could not be 100% behind the effort to achieve greater inclusion of all American voices is sad and says a lot about ignorance, at best, and hypocrisy, at worst.
Totally WOW, The_Cat.
Thanks for the link to Oxford Reference. So much internet info, so little time, and it's all good.
I started this comment to rephrase a couple of fine points, (uh, 'split hairs'), in your wording, The_Cat, (arguing by virtue of my firsthand experience in '50s and '60s TV); but now my heart for it wanes faint and besides, it'd be tangent to the topic, so ... never mind.
Yet, it seems strong to add something(s) to the "little history lesson." Especially this: At the advent of broadcasting, (radio, circa 1924), the phenomenon of transmission/reception and the radiowave frequencies proper were considered to be and comprehended as public property, common wealth, and broadcasting as a public utility. Accordingly, broadcasting towers and power and transmissions got funded by taxes, public monies. Studios and 'stations' and content production costs, perhaps even home receivers, were borderline grey areas of uncertain undecided funding. That is to say: NO commercial sponsor 'messages' (sales pitches) adulterated the information communication.
The BBC began and continued in the manner, pretty much, levying targeted taxes (annual license 'fees') on Homes Using 'it' (Television, before that: Radio; I'm going for the double enterdre of the ratings' nomenclature 'HUT' and the vernacular taint of 'drug' dependency as 'users' choice). The BBC form established the world's best standard for broadcast production. (Although public-funded broadcasting content is a political kettle of fish, of various fishiness not-necessarily-truthiness in various sovereign areas -- called 'countries' not 'markets' -- and all in all a digression too far to discuss here.)
The 1920s USA form (of sponsoring broadcasts) got bought out and corrupted by crass commercialism -- see: 'Capitalism: A Love Story,' movie by Michael Moore.
Hence, crassly informed audience, i.e., citizens, become what we beheld.
As easily as enacting 'health care reform' our determinative power by elected representatives could 'take back' the public airwaves from commercial-sponsor purview. All user-fee broadcasting, all the time. (A long-running example, sterling quality.)
We could take back all channels, pay all personnel, an entire year at a time, for about our cost of a week in Iraq. (Meaning: 1 week (2 percent) of annual taxes for our 'military charade' delusion, (as per your "red scare commie-ness" considerations, The_Cat), is about $14 billion or $20 billion these days -- depending on what the definition of 'NS' is -- and that's more or less the size of a year's 'broadcasting' ... so small that an 'additional' 4 or 5 billion pumped in by 'political ad' sales during 'election years' is an overwhelming boon.) It's our choice determining 'cultural' priorities: Citizenship by The H-Bomb or The Boob Tube.
I doubt the FOX follies could find funders in the fee-per-channel form of broadcasting as public utility. (FOX thrives now only by the fraudulent deceit of hiding in the Basic Bundle where each channel gets a snip of every cable bill payment every month whether any househeld 'user' tuned to that programming or not.) Also, it seems unlikely for many folks to fork over 'fees' for channels full of political campaign advertisements, then, so future candidates could forget so much fundraising to pay for airtime, and, hey, hope to hope, paper-thin image might get cut to confetti by the scissors of substance in politics ... disenfranchising (or dis-infatuating) Goggling On Palin voters; (btw, she wasn't pregnant last year you know, but FOX fiends don't).
Did you see or hear the one about the protesters storming in the gates of the BBC when a FOXcist fiend got airtime?
Just saying ... at the advent of broadcasting public airwaves were publicly attained, and the capitalist's commercial creed was kept confined to markets in the bazaar.
If now internet is some 'new media' (actually, technically it's not, it's only good old 1800s Americana telephony, fast-forwarded), and in its advent this web of wires is attained with only public money (attached in user/license fees taxation), perhaps and probably the "little history lesson" we might learn is to leave it like that, NONcommercial.
No, it is not what the man said. Unless you can prove otherwise, Lloyd has never said-as Zogby claims-that he wants the FCC to force white people from their jobs.
Your half of the population has done a horrible job for thousands of years. It is time to pack it in, give it up, and stop destroying the world.
Enough!
The quote is from a 'what if' brainstorming session. Perhaps he'd have been better politically correct had he said, "So white people..."must vacate those posts by attrition without which there will never be room for " "[sic]more people of color, gays"[sic]and "[sic]other people"[sic]"[sic]can have power."
Very true, Victor Colorado, unless you simply cut and paste from a Newsbusters article, which is what I think highliter has done here.
It's seems like tokenism putting white men like they have these days.
I really don't get that some in this society think that others are "lesser children of God" than they are.
Would you care to expand on this remark?
Beck and Limbaugh need not fear, as they are simply "white people".
And definitely not the party of "knee jerk." That has always been an appellation more suited to the goons on the right.
Just another condescending comment from a snobbish high-browed leftist. Oh to be as smart as you "intelligent people".
Why do so many posts on this Board have spelling and grammar errors if you are all so "intelligent"?
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