{"id":221,"date":"2004-10-14T13:46:46","date_gmt":"2004-10-14T17:46:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2004\/10\/14\/new-direction-2\/"},"modified":"2004-10-14T13:46:46","modified_gmt":"2004-10-14T17:46:46","slug":"new-direction-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2004\/10\/14\/new-direction-2\/","title":{"rendered":"New Direction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a485'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been writing occasional letters to representatives, editors, etc.<\/p>\n<p>In response to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.santacruzsentinel.com\/archive\/2004\/October\/14\/edit\/stories\/02edit.htm\">this editorial<\/a> about the Sinclair Broadcast Group&#8217;s plan to force its affilates to preempt prime time programming for an hour-long anti-Kerry attack ad masquerading as a documentary, I did these 150 words.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nYour editorial &#8220;Fairness door swings both ways&#8221; is off base.  Whether it&#8217;s OK for Sinclair Broadcast Group to force its stations to air the &#8220;Stolen Honor&#8221; special is not a First Amendment issue.<\/p>\n<p>Sinclair uses public airwaves to broadcast.  Our airwaves are an extremely valuable property of the American people.  Sinclair is allowed to use part of this property of ours for free &#8211; unlike, for instance, cell phone companies, who pay us for the portion of the airwaves they use.<\/p>\n<p>This amounts to a taxpayer subsidy of Sinclair.  But it&#8217;s not corporate welfare,<br \/>\n because we demand payback.  Part of our payback is that Sinclair has an obligation to help us hold a fair election.  If they broadcast propaganda right before the election, they are ripping off the American people.  This &#8220;public interest&#8221; obligation has been upheld by the Supreme Court, and doesn&#8217;t conflict with the First Amendment.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been writing occasional letters to representatives, editors, etc. In response to this editorial about the Sinclair Broadcast Group&#8217;s plan to force its affilates to preempt prime time programming for an hour-long anti-Kerry attack ad masquerading as a documentary, I did these 150 words. Your editorial &#8220;Fairness door swings both ways&#8221; is off base. Whether [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}