FCC Diversity Czar

Who is the Diversity Czar and What is His Agenda?

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What’s New with Lloyd?

Information compiled by Glenn Beck

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced a new “Chief Diversity Officer,” communications attorney Mark Lloyd.

But Doctor of Jurisprudence Lloyd is far more than merely a communications attorney. He was at one time a Senior Fellow at the uber-liberal Center for American Progress (CAP), for whom he co-wrote a June 2007 report entitled “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio.”

Which rails against the fact that the American people overwhelmingly prefer to listen to conservative (and Christian) talk radio rather than the liberal alternative, and suggests ways the federal government can remedy this free-market created “problem.”

* Restore local and national caps on the ownership of commercial radio stations.
* Ensure greater local accountability over radio licensing.
* Require commercial owners who fail to abide by enforceable public interest obligations to pay a fee to support public broadcasting.

These last two get perilously close to the use of “localism” to silence conservative (and Christian) radio stations, about which we have been warning for quite some time.

(CNSNews.com) – Mark Lloyd, newly appointed Chief Diversity Officer of the Federal Communications Commission, has called for making private broadcasting companies pay licensing fees equal to their total operating costs to allow public broadcasting outlets to spend the same on their operations as the private companies do. LINK

Lloyd not only wants the money to come from private companies, he is planning on regulating the content:

“Local public broadcasters and regional and national communications operations should be required to encourage and broadcast diverse views and programs,” wrote Lloyd. “These programs should include coverage of all local, state and federal government meetings, as well as daily news and public issues programming.  (see link above for complete story)

Lloyd wrote a book back in 2006 that must have caught someone in the Obama administration’s eye titled Prologue to a Farce: Communications and Democracy in America, published by the University of Illinois Press. Matt Cover explains that “Lloyd wrote Prologue to a Farce while a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress. In that capacity, he co-authored the 2007 report The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio”

The report argued that large corporate broadcasting networks had driven liberals off the radio, and that diversity of ownership would increase diversity of broadcasting voices

Did you catch that?  These unfortunate liberals have been “driven” off the radio.  Why wait for the liberals to produce a fairness doctrine when you’ve got a Diversity Czar under the White House’s thumb?

“First, from a regulatory perspective, the Fairness Doctrine was never repealed,” Lloyd and his colleagues wrote. “The Supreme Court … has never overruled the cases that authorized the FCC’s enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine. Many legal experts argue that the FCC has the authority to enforce it again – thus it technically would not be considered repealed. … Thus, the public obligations inherent in the Fairness Doctrine are still in existence and operative, at least on paper.”

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