EDITORIAL: Targeting the right

In a free society, the answer to unpopular speech should be more speech, not less.

Increasingly, however, those on the left show an alarming willingness to accept government restrictions on expression.

Consider that the Democratic candidate for president has fully embraced a constitutional amendment cloaked in the mantle of campaign finance reform that would allow federal bureaucrats to ban certain movies and even books.

Thus it comes as no surprise that the chairman of the Federal Election Commission now raises concerns that Democrats are pushing to use the power of the state to muzzle conservative media outlets and personalities.

The Washington Examiner reported last week that FEC Chairman Lee E. Goodman is resisting efforts by Democrats on the panel to roll back the media’s exemption from federal election laws governing political organizations.

“The right has begun to break the left’s media monopoly, particularly through new media outlets like the internet,” he told the Examiner, “and I sense that some on the left are starting to rethink the breadth of the media exemption and internet communications.”

As the Examiner notes, media outlets have long been exempt from FEC rules, allowing them to endorse candidates in elections without any limits or disclosure rules similar to those impacting political action committees. As conservative media outlets have gained more prominence, however, liberals have tried to squelch them by lobbying for things such as reviving the long-dead “fairness doctrine” which required broadcasters to present both sides of the issue or risk losing their licenses.

The increasing success of sites such as the Drudge Report has Mr. Goodman “concerned about disparate treatment of conservative media.” He says that protecting free speech regardless of the speaker’s political perspective is vital to the long-term health of the media and the internet.

“(Sites like these) compete with the big boys now, and I have seen storm clouds that the second you start to regulate them, there is at least the possibility or indeed proclivity for selective enforcement, so we need to keep the media free and the internet free,” said Mr. Goodman.

In a speech before Congress in 1950, Democratic President Harry Truman warned that “once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

But how many modern-day Democrats would agree?