FCC Nominee Emulates Chavez

RUSH: ‘Despite a sore throat, medical advice to stay silent and his promise that his TV and radio program Aló, presidente! (Hello President) would be shorter than the previous ones, President Hugo Chavez spoke on Sunday for five hours, when restarting his weekly program that he had suspended on January 11th. Venezuela’s President ordered his governors and mayors to draw ‘the map of the media war’ to determine which media are ‘owned by oligarchs.’ After saying that ‘there are not five million rich people in Venezuela,’ with regard to the opposition vote in the referendum, Chavez said that ‘were it not for the attacks, the lies, manipulation and exaggeration of the mistakes of the government’ by the private media, the popularity of his government would be 80 percent instead of 60 percent.’ Hugo Chavez has ordered his Rahm Emanuel, his James Carville, his Paul Begala, his George Stephanopoulos to go out and find out who these oligarchs are that own private media outlets that are criticizing his government, find out who they are, identify them and target them because his approval rating is only 60% to 70%, would be 80% without that.

Now, interestingly, the Obama administration announced the appointment to be commissioner of the FCC yesterday, Julius Genachowski. This man is highly touted as a brilliant master at designing and managing all the New Media taking place. I did a little research on Mr. Julius last night, and it turns out that Mr. Julius is very devoted to localism, local content rules. He’s very devoted to the concept of minority ownership, diversifying in ownership. Julius Genachowski, this man’s resume sounds like he would fit perfectly with Hugo Chavez in identifying some of this media critical of the government and devising strategies of what to do about it. Now, there will not be a Fairness Doctrine, as we have assured you. They’re not going to be that obvious about it. They’ll go with localism, local content rules, or they will go with diversity in ownership. Now, some of you might ask, how will that change anything?

Well, let’s say you’ve got a large owner of radio stations. Clear Channel happens to own, what is it, 1,700 radio stations, they’re not all talk, a lot of them are music stations. They even have Chinese opera format radio stations. But somebody like Obama and his new FCC chairman might look at that and say, ‘There’s not enough diversity, one big company, no, no, no, we need to break some of that up. We need minorities owning some of those radio stations. And CBS, they have too many, Citadel, they’ve got too many radio stations, and Emmis and Cumulus, they’ve got way too many stations. We’ve gotta bust up some of these conglomerate guys and open up radio to minority ownership. So, you do that, and if a bunch of minorities end up owning a bunch of stations, the minorities or the owner can do what he wants, ‘I’m getting rid of all this syndicated stuff. I don’t care if I take a bath because I’m being subsidized by the government as a minority owner.’ As a minority owner, I don’t have the money to buy these stations, as an American, I don’t have the money to buy these stations, Americans are being wiped out at the moment in Obama’s war on capitalism.

So these new minority owners will be subsidized so they won’t have to worry about removing profitable programming, and if some of them don’t like me, get rid of me, put on Al Sharpton. Get rid of me, find some local program. This is the way they envision it happening. So that they can then say, ‘The market did this, we had nothing to do with this.’ That is where they’re angling. I saw this story about Hugo Chavez ordering his minions to identify media owned by oligarchs, and get rid of them so his approval rating could get up to 80%, and I just had to smile. Look at who we are emulating is Hugo Chavez.