[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 10]
[House]
[Page 13886]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              FAIR OR FREE

  (Mr. POE asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute.)
  Mr. POE. Madam Speaker, the speech police are at it again. This time 
they want to police and control the radio airwaves. I'm not talking 
about the former Soviet Union that controlled what Russians listened to 
on the radio, I'm talking about the American speech police.
  Radio shows that air conservative ideas in the free enterprise market 
seem to be listened to by more Americans than those that listen to 
liberal ideas. I don't know why that is, but it happens. So some don't 
like that. They say it's just not fair. So they want to force the 
private radio stations, with the use of the government speech police, 
to air ideas that are liberal as well as conservative. They call this 
nonsense the ``fairness doctrine.''
  It is actually totalitarian state control of speech. And what does 
``fair'' mean? Fair means different things to different folks. In some 
places in the country like Texas, fair is where you take your chickens 
to. That's why the word ``fair'' is not in the Constitution. The 
Constitution protects free speech, not fair speech. It says Congress--
that's us, folks--shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. 
And the Constitution applies to the thieves of free speech and the 
government's speech police whether they like it or not.
  And that's just the way it is.

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