WASHINGTON–“Suppose you heard of someone who, in spite of its bloody and impoverished history, advocated socialism,” writes Don Watkins, an analyst with the Ayn Rand Center. “Suppose that person thought the key to moving America toward socialism was using government power to ensure the media pushed an anti-capitalist message. Suppose that, in order to achieve this goal, he wrote a book arguing that the Federal Communications Commission should curtail the private media with a crippling array of restrictions and taxes, and then pour tens of billions of dollars into the creation of a government-funded ‘public’ media. Suppose he also advocated subjecting Americans to mandatory ‘media training’ so they would know how to ‘properly’ interpret the media.
“What would you say of such a person? Well, if you were the Obama administration, you would say, ‘This person deserves a job at the FCC.’” This person is Mark Lloyd, the FCC’s Chief Diversity Officer.
In Lloyd’s 2006 book Prologue to a Farce: Communication and Democracy in America, he lays out precisely these proposals. “If we want to understand the anti-freedom path the FCC is heading down, we need to start by paying attention to the openly declared goals of its officers. As an agency which exists precisely in order to control the media, it should be especially alarming when one of its representatives is committed to radically expanding that control.”
