The Agitprop of Ajit Pai: The Republican FCC Commissioner Calls Out the Troops

[Commentary] The entire right-wing mediasphere flexed its powerful muscles against its only regulator, the Federal Communications Commission. It started when the new Republican FCC Commissioner, Ajit Pai, ignored traditional inter-agency channels and went straight to the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal to accuse his colleagues of "meddling with the news."

However, despite the right wing hyperventilation over the nefariousness of the CIN study, it's simply part of the FCC's statutory mandate. What's most interesting, however, is that Commissioner Pai enlisted the very same right wing Pied Pipers who have long taken control of and, indeed, dominate the very airwaves we ALL own, and which most of us agree need more diversity and public oversight -- in hopes of intimidating the new Democratic FCC Chair Tom Wheeler into providing less diversity and public oversight.

Following the siren call of Commissioner Pai's piping, both Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck dutifully took to those airwaves coast-to-coast to work their 30 million or so radio listeners into a frenzy to prevent the FCC from following the agency's decades-long mandate for determining whether local broadcast news organizations are serving the "public interest" or whether they are merely producing news stories mandated by their corporate owners.

[Wilson is Director, 'Broadcast Blues', Media Action Center]