Jim Rutenberg
speaker
207 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 10 Jul
Jim Rutenberg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, Fowler was basically beside himself.
And anyone who paid attention at the time or has gone back and studied that period would be shocked at this in general because the Republican Party made such a point of abandoning the Fairness Doctrine.
When it came to media, it was one of the most foundational things in Republican orthodoxy.
And Mark Fowler is the avatar of that.
And though the Fairness Doctrine is still gone, these public interest provisions are being used in the ways that he always opposed.
And I said to him, actually, like, well, what about these public interest provisions?
Why didn't you get rid of them?
And his point was twofold.
He said, for one thing, the public interest provisions are in the actual law.
The Fairness Doctrine was an FCC policy.
He had power there.
But he also said he didn't think that someone would try to use the surviving provisions quite in this way.
Yes.
It came up a lot in the Biden years when conservatives complained that the Biden administration was pressuring the social media platforms, which can do whatever they want with content, but was pressuring them to censor conservative speech, especially when it came to COVID or election denialism.
The government cannot force the platforms to censor speech.
It's not allowed because of the First Amendment.
But jawboning coerces the platforms into censoring so that the government gets what it wants regardless, where it couldn't legally really ask for it.
So when Ted Cruz, who's been talking about jawboning and working up legislation dealing with social media, sees the Jimmy Kimmel imbroglio unfold, he's really bothered by it.
He likened Chairman Carr, the easy way or hard way line, Cruz likened it to a mobster in the movie Goodfellas.
So what he was doing there was really defining this, too, as jawboning.
Showing 101–120 of 207 · page 6 of 11
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