One of the far right’s newest targets is Mark Lloyd, the Associate General Counsel and Chief Diversity Officer at the FCC, who has previously served as a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Michael Savage has called Lloyd a “neo-Nazi” and “piece of garbage,” adding that Lloyd’s title is “code word for the KGB.” Glenn Beck has dubbed him Obama’s “diversity czar” who wants to “clamp down on my freedom of speech.” At issue is a CAP/Free Press report Lloyd co-authored in 2007 called “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio,” which argues for more localism and diversity in the media.

At yesterday’s House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing on FCC oversight, Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) decided to carry the right wing’s water, objecting to the “strongly opinionated” Lloyd:

The information from Mr. Lloyd would indicate he’s not for putting Fairness Doctrine back in, he’s just for a whole different scheme that gets to the same outcome. I hope we don’t have a government speech czar in place that’s going to drive a whole different mechanism through the rule-making and challenging the licensees.

FCC Chairman Genachowski strongly defended Lloyd, unequivocally stating that the commission will not “engage in any censorship of broadcasters or anyone in the media on the basis of political views and opinions.” He also underscored the importance of promoting media diversity:

Diversity is another area where for a very long time there has been — I think there still is — a bipartisan consensus that it is an important objective of the communications policy in the FCC. The diversity goals are mentioned in hundreds of FCC decisions, they’re explicitly mentioned in the communications act, the Supreme Court has acknowledged it’s a role, and the idea of having diversity as an objective of the FCC and having staff focused on it seems to be a natural extension. [...]

He’s not working on Fairness Doctrine issues, he’s not working on censorship issues, he’s not working on these issues. He’s working on opportunity issues, primarily now around broadband adoption, focusing on making sure that broadband is available to all Americans.

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps stressed that Lloyd is highly respected in the communications community and was instrumental in facilitating the DTV transition by reading out to non-traditional stakeholders. “[W]e want a place of intellectual firmament and different ideas” at the FCC, but “we rely on the judgment of the organization and the people at the top of the organization to make intelligent decisions about where we’re going,” said Copps. “As for the personal characteristics of this particular individual, I think they are of the highest, and I, for one, am pleased he’s at the FCC.” Watch it:

So basically, the right wing — following the lead of Rush Limbaugh and Beck — is distorting a report on media diversity to fear-monger about a doctrine that few support and attack a man who will have nothing to do with implementing policy at the FCC.

Yesterday, tens of thousands of people gathered in rural West Virginia for the coal-powered “Friends of America Rally.” The point of the event was to rail against the Waxman-Markey clean energy legislation. Massey CEO Don Blankenship, the driving force behind the rally, said that “America itself” was at stake if the bill wasn’t stopped.

Fox News personality Sean Hannity was one of the rally’s keynote speakers, and he took the opportunity to gloat about Van Jones’ resignation. He vowed to the audience that he would get rid of “every other one” of Obama’s so-called czars:

HANNITY: Do you want another czar?

CROWD: No!

HANNITY: I don’t think so. By the way, we got rid of one, and my job starting tomorrow night is to get rid of every other one. I promise you that!

Watch it:

Hannity’s pledge is part of a larger right-wing campaign. Glenn Beck has announced that Cass Sunstein, Mark Lloyd, and Carol Browner are his next targets and asked his followers to dig up all the dirt they can on them.

Republican lawmakers are trying to argue that Obama should be barred from appointing more advisers until the administration addresses their constitutional concerns. Yesterday on Fox News, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) said that all of Obama’s advisers should have to go through the same vetting and approval process through the Senate as Supreme Court nominees and Cabinet secretaries. Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) has said that the “president should suspend any further appointments of so-called ‘czars’ until Congress has an opportunity to examine the background and responsibilities of these individuals.”

The conservative strategy is to bring the executive branch to a screeching halt. Republicans in the Senate have tried to hold up key Obama nominees in what amounts to ideological witch hunts and self-interested horse-trading. Additionally, several of the so-called czars have actually already been confirmed by the Senate.

Since the FCC appointed Mark Lloyd as the agency’s Chief Diversity Officer/Associate General Counsel on July 29, conservatives have made him their new target in the ongoing campaign to baselessly warn about the reemergence of the Fairness Doctrine.

The most absurd attacks have come from pundits like right-wing radio host Michael Savage, who has called Lloyd a “neo-Nazi” and “piece of garbage” intent on closing down “conservatives in the media.” He said that Lloyd’s title — Chief Diversity Officer — is “code word for the KGB.” For the record, Lloyd has a distinguished career on communications policy issues. Most recently he was a vice president at the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He taught communications policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, served as general counsel to the Benton Foundation, worked as a communications attorney at a major D.C. law firm, and has nearly 20 years of experience in journalism.

The right wing’s main problem with Lloyd is a CAP/Free Press report he co-authored in 2007 called “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio.” The report’s authors explicitly state that they do not think the Fairness Doctrine should be reinstated, and Lloyd has since said that he has “no plans or interest” to resurrect the law. Nevertheless, conservatives are insisting that that goal is really Lloyd’s secret plan.

Unfortunately, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has agreed to do the far right’s bidding. Last week, he wrote a letter to the FCC objecting to Lloyd’s appointment:

Simply put, I strongly disagree with Mr. Lloyd. I do not believe that more regulation, more taxes or fines, or increased government intervention in the commercial radio market will serve the public interest or further the goals of diversifying the marketplace. I am concerned that despite his statements that the Fairness Doctrine is unnecessary, Mr. Lloyd supports a backdoor method of furthering the goals of the Fairness Doctrine by other means.

These claims by Grassley and the right wing are misguided and based on a fundamental misreading — that may be either accidental or deliberate — of the report. A look at some of these myths:

– MYTH #1: Conservative voices will be kicked off the air. The report actually argues that telling radio broadcasters what to put on the air is inappropriate. What the report advocates for are policies that promote local programming, so what’s on the air is responsive to those communities and their advertisers, as opposed to national syndicators and large station group business models. Right now, the regulatory structure pushes out locally-owned, minority-owned, and female-owned stations. Grassley’s fear of “diversifying the marketplace” will not necessarily create more progressive talk radio; it may even get more conservative. It all depends on the on the location and interests of the community.

– MYTH #2: Lloyd wants to impose more taxes and fines on broadcasters. Grassley’s conception of taxes and fines is convoluted and out of context. The report argues that if broadcast stations don’t want to do local programming, they can pay a fine and get out of doing it. That money would go to the local public radio station for local programming.

– MYTH #3: Progressives secretly want a return to the Fairness Doctrine. Even Grassley admits that Lloyd never advocates a return to the Fairness Doctrine. Why? As Lloyd has explained, the Fairness Doctrine “never by itself fostered coverage of important issues in a way that spoke to the diversity of interests in local communities across our country. In the late 1960’s, the supposed golden age of the Fairness Doctrine, the Kerner Commission reported the failure of mainstream media to report on minority communities.”

Approximately 91 percent of weekday talk radio programming is conservative, and just nine percent is progressive. However, “43 percent of regular talk radio listeners identify as conservative, while 23 percent identify as liberal and 30 percent as moderate.” Much of this imbalance was created in the wave of consolidation after the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which “removed the national limit on the number of radio stations that one could own.” What progressives like Lloyd are advocating is not more liberalism, but more localism.