Greta Van Susteren: Obama’s News Police Meant to Intimidate, Stifle and Chill Speech (Video)

On Wednesday night’s On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, a panel discussed the Obama Regime’s latest power grab – an FCC a pilot program that would send “researchers” to newsrooms to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run. Former FCC Commissioner AJIT PAI wrote about the plan in his Wall Street Journal piece, The FCC Wades Into the Newsroom.

With its “Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs,” or CIN, the agency plans to send researchers to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run. A field test in Columbia, S.C., is scheduled to begin this spring.

The purpose of the CIN, according to the FCC, is to ferret out information from television and radio broadcasters about “the process by which stories are selected” and how often stations cover “critical information needs,” along with “perceived station bias” and “perceived responsiveness to underserved populations.”

Susteren is outraged. She had on The Hill’s AB Stoddard, The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty and the Washington Examiner’s Byron York to discuss the Regime’s stealth attempt to bring back the  Fairness Doctrine, and they all agreed that it was a horrible idea that no self-respecting newsroom will tolerate.

Greta named three things that she thought she’d never see happen in her own country – the NSA spying on all American citizens, the use of drones to kill American citizens, and now this. Tumulty noted the FCC was also planning to visit newspapers which they don’t even have the power to regulate.

“You ask a news organization what their news philosophy is, it’s to cover the news and make a profit out of that”, Tumulty said.

Greta retorted, “if they asked me, you know what I’d say? None of your business.” She went on to say she hoped any other news organization would respond the same way.

Stoddard wondered why any newsroom or newspaper would feel like they would have to comply with these FCC inquisitions. ”I can’t imagine even the most liberal outfit coming from this profession being willing to share their philosophy and change the way they cover anything…” She said.

Greta declared that the whole thing is “meant to intimidate and to stifle and to chill,” and expressed shock and horror that someone thought that this was a good idea to begin with.

AB Stoddard said, “it seems so ludicrous – so unAmerican, that I can’t believe that it would ever become real, but the fact that someone had an idea about it and it didn’t get slapped down – is more than strange.”

One gets the uneasy feeling that Obama looks to Communist South American Dictators who take control of the news media with great admiration and envy.