FORT LAUDERDALE, FL (July 21, 2010) –The Obama Administration's controversial appointment of Mark Lloyd as "chief diversity officer" at the Federal Communications Commission signals a threat to the broadcast freedoms of dissenting media, experts warn on the July 25 nationwide broadcast of The Coral Ridge Hour TV program.
Since 2009, Lloyd has been charged with diversifying America's media landscape.
"If he begins to argue that content is part of that diversity, that a Christian radio station ought to be a religious radio station and air diverse religious viewpoints, you can easily see how challenging that would be for Christian media to continue to be faithful to the Gospel," said Dr. Frank Wright, president of the National Religious Broadcasters, the nation's largest association of Christian communicators.
The Sunday broadcast examines Lloyd's background and explores why he poses a threat to Christian and conservative voices in the media.
As a senior fellow at the ultra-liberal Center for American Progress, Lloyd co-authored a paper entitled, "The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio." That paper laments that, "Conservative talk continues to be pushed out over the airwaves in greater multiples of hours than progressive talk is broadcast" and questioned whether such stations were "serving the listening needs of all Americans."
"Any policies or regulations or legislation that enables the government to become the arbiter of the discussion of which ideas are appropriate and which are not ought to be opposed as strenuously as possible," Wright said.
Experts on the broadcast also question past statements that Lloyd made in which he appears to praise Venezuela's communist President Hugo Chavez.
On a tape that surfaced after his appointment, Lloyd said: "In Venezuela, with Chavez, is really an incredible revolution-a democratic revolution, to begin to put in place things that are going to have an impact on the people of Venezuela."
"When I hear that kind of praise for Mr. Chavez, I get very concerned, because what I've seen happen in Venezuela is a president who's closed down radio stations that spoke out in opposition to his policies, who's limited the freedoms of the people to speak out against government policies with which they disagree," Wright said.
Lloyd claims his statement has been misinterpreted, but Maria Elvira Salazar, a television host and journalist at the Spanish language Mega TV based in Miami, says that anyone in U.S. leadership who applauds Chavez's efforts is "uninformed."
"The effect that Chavez has had on free speech [in Venezuela] has been terrible," Salazar said. "Why? Because he needs to control every single media outlet in Venezuela in order to control the opposition movement."
It is alarming, said Robert Knight, author of Radical Rulers: The White House Elites Who Are Pushing America Toward Socialism, when a presidential appointee to the body that regulates broadcast media praises a figure like Chavez, known for his heavy-handed approach to restricting broadcast freedom.
"Mark Lloyd is a key player in the Left's campaign to silence the one segment of the media that leans conservative-talk radio," said Robert Knight, Senior Writer for Coral Ridge Ministries and also the author of The Silencers: How Liberals Are Trying to Shut Down Media Freedom in the U.S.