Say Anything Blog

As I posted before, Jeff Jarvis is upset about Clear Channel's decision to take Howard Stern off the air on some stations. Now he's even more upset that he's been labeled a, gasp, liberal for this view:

I supported the war and people called me a right-winger and refused to accept my liberal credentials. Now I go after the Bush administration over free speech and Howard Stern and also don't like Gibson's Passion and the right-wingers call me a left-winger. Those who hated me one week love me the next; those who loved me one week hate me the next; and a few smart people sit back and laugh. Life becomes very confusing when you have only one litmus test by which to judge mankind.

I've been uncomfortable with political polarization for a while now. I don't like labeling people "liberal" or "conservative." Most of us are either left-leaning or right-leaning, but we all have issues where we may lean a bit in the opposite direction. There are still more who can't help but cling to the dogma of either the right of the left, but that's a subject for another discussion.

I'm not going to label Jeff as anything, but I don't like the way he came out against Bush with guns blazing when the Stern story first hit:

The more I think about this, the more enraged I get. One tit flopped out and the government -- the Bush administration -- can't wait to play to its far-right fringe and censor speech and intimidate speech and chill speech. How dare they? This is not the role we expect of our government. We don't need a nanny.

Jeff has a right to his opinion, but his knee-jerk reaction was to blame Bush, just like a member of the dogmatic left. The Whitehouse is not the FCC. As an Instapundit reader has pointed out, the Whitehouse is not responsible for the FCC's change of policy:

As someone who covers the FCC for a living, I can assure you that the pressure for a crackdown on broadcast indecency did not originate in the White House. In fact, critics have accused Michael Powell of being too lax. The main driver of tougher enforcement, at least on the FCC, has been Democratic Commissioner Michael Copps, a former aide to S.C. Sen. Fritz Hollings. In the Congress, there's been bipartisan support for a crackdown coming from the likes of Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Fred Uption, R-Mich. The White House has not been at the forefront of this issue.

Jeff is a smart guy and his blog is interesting, but I think he's way off target on this one. He's backed off a little now that he's had a chance to cool down, so maybe he's coming to his senses.