When the FCC announced its “Future of Media” hearing, it was described in rather contradictory terms.  Steven Waldman, who is heading up the project, had this to say:

The starting point for this effort, of course, is the First Amendment.  A free press, independent of government control, is a foundational principle of our democracy. Any time the government even looks at the media, we have to be very careful. Keeping that principle in mind always, the experts here working on these issues will work first to gain a detailed, fact-based understanding of what’s happening in the media world. Then, we will make recommendations, including possibly suggestions for government policy changes.

So the commission recognizes the substantial first amendment ground they are stepping all over, but jumped right in anyway.  A lot of small government and libertarian types felt the hair on the back of their neck stand up.  The Progress & Freedom Foundation went as far as to say the very inquiry would chill free speech.

The problem is that the very act of initiating such an inquiry will chill protected speech; government inquiries into what is and is not working in the area of news, information, and media is itself an affront to the First Amendment. And it is no answer that the Commission has embarked on this journey with beneficent motives, it has no power to derogate from the protections of the First Amendment in the name of what one group of bureaucrats may think are important government interests.

Some suggested the FCC’s commitment to ‘vibrant and diverse news’ was code for the regulation of news content and a return of something akin to the Fairness Doctrine.

Our good friends at Free Press are apparently hoping that is the case, at least according to a post on their Save The News blog.

The “Future of Media” inquiry calls on citizens to report on the quality of their local media and imagine what a better media system might look like… In short, this is an opportunity to envision the media we want to see, not merely accept the media we currently have.

It is absolutely no secret how left-wing fringe groups like Free Press feel about “the media we currently have”.  Things like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or even the conservative viewpoint of their local paper’s editorial board send them into a sweat.  As a result, it’s not too hard to guess what “the media we want to see” would look like.

I suspect the media they want to see is one where opposing viewpoints (like those offered by the now defunct Air America) receive government subsidies to push the fringe view – regardless of whether those views can draw an audience outside Austin and Berkeley.

In short, this isn’t about the “Future of Media.”  At least in the hopes and aspirations of Free Press, this is about a return to the Fairness Doctrine – or something even worse.  As Free Press’ founder Robert McChesney described it:

In the U.S, there is a sort of religious attachment to the idea of “free-press,” which is taken to mean the state has absolutely no role to play…  We have to appreciate that the U.S. media system is based on subsidies, monopoly power and the government playing a large role… The last thing we want to do, however, is rebuild the old media system. We are moving ahead toward a new kind of journalism. We are struggling for a journalism that incorporates the new media technologies so as to greatly democratize, open up, and make more accountable, the public information system… The result of such democratization will, in my view, be a marked shift to the political Left.