Fairness Doctrine and Blogs
I've gone underground to finish off a few projects related to Colossal Cave Adventure, so the blogging has been light. But I'm surfacing in order to blog about this poll, which shows that a majority of respondents said that the government should not force bloggers to give equal time to opposing views, some 31% disagreed. I'd really rather see all this information in a table, and of course I'd want to see the actual questions, but it looks like that sort of thing is reserved for paying customers.
Even Democrats say hands-off the Internet though but by a far smaller margin than Republicans and unaffiliated voters. Democrats oppose government-mandated balance on the Internet by a 48% to 37% margin. Sixty-one percent (61%) of Republicans reject government involvement in Internet content along with 67% of unaffiliated voters.So that means that almost half of the Democrats who resonded are in favor of government regulation of the content of blogs. Did the question differentiate between personal blogs and professional ones? What about discussion forums or social networking sites? How net-savvy were the people who were polled? Was it a telephone survey that only called people with land lines? There are too many unanswered questions to make any sort of conclusions (which isn't stopping the folks at slashdot, of course).
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