The Left has watched uneasily as power drains away daily from the CBS Newses and the Time magazines of the liberal mainstream media and flows toward a more politically pluralistic array of new media alternatives that range from (mostly) conservative talk radio to (Fox-dominated) cable news to the ceaselessly expanding (thoroughly bi-partisan) Internet. And make no mistake: liberals want to snuff out this exciting, democratic world of analysis and debate and return to the good old days, when you got up in the morning with The New York Times and had dinner with Dan Rather—and basically kept quiet while your elite betters told you what to think. Impossible, you say. But the Left means business on the media front, and lawmakers are cooking up a host of new regulations to drive incorrect (right-of-center) opinions from the public sphere. In its highest-profile effort to shut down the political speech it doesn’t like, the Left is working to restore the Fairness Doctrine or some kind of regulatory analogue. The effects would be seismic—nothing less than wiping out most political talk radio.

The Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine, which became a formal agency regulation in the late 1940s but had been in effect since the late 1920s, required broadcast stations—radio first, then television—to provide “opportunity for the presentation of contrasting viewpoints” on controversial issues. The language sounds anodyne. But in practice it had a huge influence on how broadcasters operated. Broadcasters who didn’t follow the rules could incur FCC fines, be forced