The new FCC Associate General Counsel and Chief Diversity Officer Mark Lloyd will seek to reinstate a backdoor ‘fairness doctrine’, designed to silence conservative and Christian talk radio. Under the guise of ‘diversity’, they will pressure broadcasters to diversify ownership which will lead to drastic programming changes not consistent with marketplace demands, but with an ideological agenda. These backdoor FCC regulations will achieve the same goals as the misnamed ‘Fairness Doctrine’.

Mark Lloyd has apparently expressed disturbing ideas against free speech in his guidebook for liberal activists on how they can use the FCC to threaten the licenses of stations airing conservative or Christian programming. Using insidious euphemisms like “media diversity” they can justify any and all infringements upon free speech — it’s only ‘diverse’ enough when they say it is.

Moreover, Lloyd seeks to impose an annual FCC license fee equal to each station’s annual gross operating budget. This fee would go to fund public broadcasting stations, which will then air liberal programming. Lloyd has stated, “we call for ownership rules that we think will create greater local diversity…we call for more localism by putting teeth into the licensing rules.” The idea that Lloyd and others in government seem to be operating under, is if you can’t compete in a free market, use the power of government to harass, extort and shut down your competition.

As NewsBusters has written, Lloyd is “virulently anti-conservative, anti-capitalist, almost myopically racially fixated and exuberantly pro-regulation.” Prior to his current position, Lloyd was a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress. While there, he co-authored the 2007 report called The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio.

The mere fact that someone at the FCC can have a title like “Diversity Officer” is already dubious, and now this person will actively try to shut down radio programming he does not agree with politically.