TNR’s Marin Cogan has definitively debunked the conservative fear-mongering about Democrats reinstating the Fairness Doctrine that I questioned last week:

Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and other friends have spent the past year screaming about the horrors of Barack Obama. And, while it’s true that they talked ad nauseam about socialism and the Weathermen and Jeremiah Wright, careful listeners would have noticed a recurring theme of anxiety: that Obama was going to use the newly acquired levers of government to destroy them. Specifically, conservative paranoia over the possible reinstatement of the “fairness doctrine,” a defunct policy requiring that broadcasters allow opposing points of view to be heard over the airwaves, has reached a fevered pitch. In September, George Will was warning his readers that, “[u]nless McCain is president, the government will reinstate the … ‘fairness doctrine.’” In October, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page chimed in, predicting that under the spooky-sounding “liberal supermajority,” the fairness doctrine was “likely to be reimposed,” with the goal being “to shut down talk radio and other voices of political opposition.” And, two weeks before the election, the New York Post blasted: “Dems Get Set to Muzzle the Right.”

On Election Day, conservatives found a new bogeyman in Senator Chuck Schumer, after Fox News host Bill Hemmer cornered him about the issue on the air. Schumer just smirked: “I think we should all try to be fair and balanced, don’t you?” Rush Limbaugh seized on Schumer’s comments as evidence that the Democrats would “do everything they can” to bring the doctrine back. Two days after the election, National Review’s Peter Kirsanow tried to rally the troops to preempt the return of the policy. “Waiting until Inauguration Day to get geared up is too late. By that time the Fairness Doctrine Express will be at full steam–wavering Democrats will be pressed to support the new Democratic president, weak-kneed Republicans will want to display comity, the mainstream media will not be saddened to see talk radio annihilated and much of the public will be too enraptured by Obama’s Camelot inauguration to notice or care.”

To figure out who was causing such agitation, I went searching for the proponents of the fairness doctrine. I looked at Obama’s position–and it turns out that he doesn’t want the policy reinstated. Then I called the array of Democratic congressmen who had been tagged by conservatives as doctrine proponents. But they all denied any intention to push for its reinstatement. As some of the world’s great egotists, it’s not surprising that Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly believe they would be the first political prisoners interned in an Obama administration. But, the more I searched for actual evidence of the doctrine’s return, the more I had to conclude that Schumer was just messing with their heads…

It’s no wonder, then, that conservatives fear the fairness doctrine’s return and busily document any favorable mention of the policy by Democrats. One of the most recent remarks that fueled the paranoia occurred in June, when John Gizzi, a reporter from the conservative magazine Human Events, asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi if she would allow a vote on a bill called the Broadcaster Freedom Act, which was introduced last year by former talk-show host turned House member Mike Pence in an attempt to permanently outlaw the reinstatement of the policy. Pelosi said she wouldn’t, mentioning New York Representative Louise Slaughter as an active proponent of reinstating the fairness doctrine. But Slaughter, like many other media-reform advocates, has shifted focus away from the doctrine in recent years…

Conservatives also focus on the 2005 effort by Democratic Representative Maurice Hinchey of New York to introduce a bill that would have reinstated the doctrine. But that effort went nowhere….

Today, the doctrine has almost no support from media-reform advocates…

Responses from the offices of most of the Democrats who have been pegged as fairness-doctrine proponents–Schumer, Dick Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, and others–have ranged from a firm denial that the issue is a priority at all to disbelief at finding themselves at the center of a manufactured controversy….

Meanwhile, the president-elect himself has said in no uncertain terms that he does “not support reimposing the fairness doctrine on broadcasters.” Republican paranoia is nothing more than that.