Guest editorial: Getting tough on free speech

"The Republicans went into a closet, met with themselves and announced a compromise," he said in a widely reported witticism.

Maybe he's right, but if the Democratic senator from South Carolina really believes what he says -- that tight governmental restrictions are required to prevent an era of frighteningly few media voices -- he has been in a closet talking to a cuckoo bird.

His, though, is the excuse being offered by many on both left and right for maintaining and even extending a high level of government control over mass communication. Diversity of expression is at risk, we are told, unless the government prevents a marketplace takeover by a small gang of media moguls.

As goofy as the thesis is, it is being used to justify liberty-abusing legislative schemes that range as far as corralling radio talk shows that curl the hair of liberals.

And the thesis is indeed goofy -- blatantly, transparently, absolutely goofy. In all of human history, there has never been a place or time with as many readily available and separately owned sources of news and information and points of view as in the United States of America in this first decade of the 21st century.

Start with television.

It was in the 1950s before my family or most others even had TVs, and when we did, we had limited choices for national or local TV news for something close to two decades: ABC, CBS or NBC and their affiliates. Today, I can also catch the "Jim Lehrer News Hour" on PBS, watch congressional debates and more on C-Span, check in on my city council on a local access station, catch the national and international news any hour of the day on three different channels, watch a number of business news shows and watch more public policy debates -- shouting matches? -- on cable TV than is advisable for mental health.

The above is just for starters. There are now four more networks, and I have more than 100 cable channels available to me. I forget the exact number, but I do know that if I prefer watching jazz, old movies, sports, interviews with authors, history documentaries or nature shows instead of mindless network sitcoms, I can.

Let's move on to the Internet.

All it does is put virtually every daily newspaper in this country and the equivalent of a major library at the fingertips of anyone with access to a computer. The number of news, public-policy information and opinion sites is what -- in the hundreds of thousands, the millions?

There's an argument that most people most of the time check out Internet news on sites owned by just a few conglomerates. That's beside the point, just as it would be transparently disingenuous to say that an ice cream store that offers 1,000 flavors isn't really offering meaningful variety because most people end up buying chocolate or strawberry.

The Federal Communications Commission was reflecting these new realities when it ruled that the networks could own TV stations with the potential of reaching 45 percent of the national audience instead of the old rule of 35 percent. The Republican agreement in Congress now is for 39 percent, which does not mean that a given network will own the only station in any town where it acquires a new one or actually be able to reach more people nationally via TV than it could previously.

The autocratic-minded -- who erroneously conclude that the growth of some media companies has meant a paucity of news or entertainment choices for the public -- don't stop with a desire to hamper network acquisitions at a time when networks get far smaller shares of national audience than they used to. Some want to go so far as to reinstate a version of the old, obnoxious fairness doctrine and require radio and TV stations to air views in addition to those of popular talk-show hosts, thereby quite conceivably endangering the existence of some of these shows.

In other words, the real threat to media voices comes from government, not media companies. If the would-be autocrats get their way, it won't be just Hollings, a cuckoo bird and some Republican senators who are in a closet. It will also be the spirit of free speech and fee press as embodied in the First Amendment.