A czar for every harm — including media bias

If you liked Van Jones, you'll love Mark Lloyd.

Jones, as you recall, was the green jobs czar who resigned after it was revealed he was an avowed communist and signer of a crackpot document accusing the Bush administration of being complicit in the 9/11 attacks.

Lloyd is another of Obama's army of czars, appointed in August to the newly created post of associate general counsel and chief diversity officer (whatever that entails) at the Federal Communications Commission. So far the number of czars is estimated at somewhere around 30. As best as I can tell, they may be paid somewhere north $175,000 a year.

Lloyd is one of those products of vaunted academia with a narrow special-interest agenda.

According to the FCC announcement of his appointment, Lloyd was an adjunct professor of public policy at Georgetown University, a visiting scholar at MIT, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and, before becoming a communications lawyer, a broadcast journalist at NBC and CNN.

In 2007, he published a book called "Prologue to a Farce: Democracy and Communication in America." The title is taken from a passage in a James Madison letter of Aug. 4,1822, to William T. Barry.

In that letter, Madison applauded the Kentucky Legislature for appropriating funds for a system of general public education.

"A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. ...

"(I)t is better for the poorer classes to have the aid of the richer by a general tax on property, than that every parent should provide at his own expence for the education of his children ...

"Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty & dangerous encroachments on the public liberty."

Lloyd uses the snippet from the letter to launch into a diatribe against the nation's news media, especially the electronic media, which are now subject to his czarist proclivities. In his book, Lloyd has one segment bemoaning: "Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?" As if that were not enough, he follows up later with a section called, "Why Is There No Socialism in America -- Redux."

In the latter section he complains about the 2003 FCC decision that "reversed thirty years of communications law and eliminated rules designed to preserve a diversity of local voices."

Specifically, the rule relaxed ownership rules, for example, allowing a newspaper owner to also own a network television station in the same market.

Lloyd is a big advocate of what is being called "localism," which is really a ruse to allow de facto re-establishment of aspects of the Fairness Doctrine and silence conservative talk radio. By requiring a certain amount of locally produced programming, it is thought this would crowd out airtime for the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, conservative talkers who have some of the highest ratings in radio.

Lloyd is given to a bit of interpretation of history to suit his premise that news media are puppets of their corporate masters. He writes, "The socialists, no matter how successful they were in the so-called Progressive Era, could not in the long run compete effectively against the organized power of the trusts. Not because their ideas were weak, but because the trusts gained control of the public arena through their control of the mass circulation newspapers and the Associated Press. The socialists were merely, as (Upton) Sinclair puts it, 'conveying some small portion of the truth to some small portions of the population.' So at least part of the solution must be to restore some measure of political equality in the place where the public deliberates."

There you have it. This czar believes the nation's newspapers and the AP are far too conservative.

With a free press and a good education we should not fear of "crafty & dangerous encroachments on the public liberty."

Thomas Mitchell is editor of the Review-Journal and writes about the role of the press and access to public information. He may be contacted at 383-0261 or via e-mail at tmitchell@reviewjournal.com. Read his blog at lvrj.com/blogs/mitchell.