Kerry; Minister of Truth?

P.J. O'Rourke takes notice of John F. Kerry's Orwellian moment at the Kennedy Presidential Library last month:

"We learned," Kerry continued, "that the mainstream media, over the course of the last year, did a pretty good job of discerning. But there's a subculture and a sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information. And that has a profound impact and undermines what we call the mainstream media of the country. And so the decision-making ability of the American electorate has been profoundly impacted as a consequence of that. The question is, what are we going to do about it?"

Later, he gave a hint:

"This all began, incidentally, when the Fairness Doctrine ended. You would have had a dramatic change in the discussion in this country had we still had a Fairness Doctrine in the course of the last campaign. But the absence of a Fairness Doctrine and the corporatization of the media has changed dramatically the ability of and the filter through which certain kinds of information get to the American people . . . "

O'Rourke thinks this marks the end of Kerry's political career. Unfortunately the FLUBA Committee on JFK II's Strange Semantics doubts that. If censoring your opponents ability to criticize you, is said to be fairness, there will be plenty of people willing to defend. After all, there are already some prominent economists ever willing to send comments made to their blogs, that they disagree with, into the memory hole