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.

A recent report by the Center for American Progress and Free Press confirms that talk radio, one of the most widely used media formats in America, is dominated almost exclusively by conservatives. It also finds that ownership diversity is needed to ensure balance:

Ownership diversity is perhaps the single most important variable contributing to the structural imbalance based on the data. … [S]tations controlled by group owners — those with stations in multiple markets or more than three stations in a single market — were statistically more likely to air conservative talk.

A few days after the release of the report, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) introduced a bill in the House blocking the resurrection of the Fairness Doctrine. On Friday, McCain joined him, introducing the Broadcaster Freedom Act:

With the great number of media sources available today, divergent viewpoints do not have to be offered on the same radio or television show, but can be found simply by channel surfing, reading a newspaper or browsing an Internet blog.

Despite these alarms by McCain and others on the right wing, the Fairness Doctrine is not likely to be reinstated. In fact, the CAP/Free Press report specifically states, “Simply reinstating the Fairness Doctrine will do little to address the gap between conservative and progressive talk unless the underlying elements of the public trustee doctrine are enforced.”

McCain’s bill is nothing more than a pander to the right wing. In the past, the senator has repeatedly advocated greater media diversity. In 2002, he introduced the Telecommunications Ownership Diversification Act to level “the playing field between small business owners and CEOs of huge corporations trying to purchase a telecommunications business.” Some other highlights:

“I think that’s [the number of minority-owned radio and broadcasting stations] an important factor because that’s where people get their news and information and everybody should have the right to get different messages of different kinds and this is really what this is all about.” [Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing, 1/30/03]

“When one corporation owns all the stations in one market, that becomes a problem for us all,” he said. [National Journal Congress Daily, 5/22/03]

Echoing McCain’s concerns about media consolidation, one of the remedies in the CAP/Free Press report is to restore local and national caps on the ownership of commercial radio stations.

McCain has sacrificed his “maverick” position on ownership caps in favor of pandering to the right wing on a non-issue.

Yesterday, the Center for American Progress and Free Press released a detailed statistical analysis confirming that talk radio is dominated almost exclusively by conservatives. In addition to the analysis, the report offers remedies for correcting this imbalance.

Several right-wing bloggers are now attacking progressives for advocating the reinstitution of the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to devote airtime to important and controversial issues and to provide contrasting views on these issues in some form. Michelle Malkin titled her post on our report “Fairness Doctrine Watch” and Sister Toldjah posted information on how fight back “against this attempted resurrection of the Fairness Doctrine.” Similarly, the National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg wrote:

Does anyone really believe liberals would even entertain this renewed passion for the fairness doctrine if talk radio were overwhelmingly liberal? It just strikes me as so transparently opportunistic and unprincipled. If a conservative were to argue that the state should get involved in making Hollywood, or the biggest newspapers, or the broadcast news networks, or leading museums, publishing houses, or universities less liberal, liberals would justifiably scream bloody murder about censorship and propaganda.

Actually, the report does not argue that the Fairness Doctrine should be resurrected. It specifically states that the Fairness Doctrine likely would not correct the imbalance in talk radio. Additionally, serious concerns are raised by the FCC explicitly reviewing and regulating radio content or speech. From the report:

[T]he Fairness Doctrine was never, by itself, an effective tool to ensure the fair discussion of important issues. The Fairness Doctrine was most effective as part of a regulatory structure that limited license terms to three years, subjected broadcasters to license challenges through comparative hearings, required notice to the local community that licenses were going to expire, and empowered the local community through a process of interviewing a variety of local leaders. Added to this regulatory structure was the cooperation of the broadcast industry through the National Association of Broadcasters Code of Conduct

Simply reinstating the Fairness Doctrine will do little to address the gap between conservative and progressive talk unless the underlying elements of the public trustee doctrine are enforced, in particular, the requirements of local accountability and the reasonable airing of important matters.

The report argues instead that we should address the more significant problem of concentrated ownership and ineffective regulation in order to push the market structure to better meet local needs. As report co-author John Halpin stated, “If we break up concentrated ownership, and encourage greater local accountability over radio licensing, and still end up with lots of conservative talk, then so be it. We don’t think this will happen but at least the playing field would have been made more level.”

The CAP/Free Press report argues for more speech, not less. Conservatives should get their facts straight before blindly attacking others.