Hollywood Everafter

Democrats have been pushing the Fairness Doctrine, which is a not-so-veiled effort to kill talk radio.

Enter Oprah, the daytime TV talk show diva. Her Web site is filled with e-love for Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama. She herself welcomed the Illinois senator and his wife Michelle to the comfy stage sofa.

But now Oprah has issued a written statement that she will not allow Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin anywhere near her Chicago soundstage. She says she has “made the decision not to use my show as a platform for any of the candidates.”

So much for consistency in Fairness Doctrine ideology.

Interestingly, though, the people have a way of implementing their own Fairness Doctrine, or when they’re unable they at least know how to give media elites some grief.

One Republican woman’s group in Florida has announced a boycott of Oprah’s show and her magazine.

Oprah’s Web site, too, has been flooded with complaints over the Palin rebuff. Female fans are up in arms and are letting Oprah know that if her daytime show features influential women, it is outrageous to refuse to have on the first female Republican vice presidential candidate in history.

Meanwhile one of the hosts of ABC’s “The View” has defamed Alaska’s governor via a Web blog.

Whoopi Goldberg said on the show that it was legitimate to question how Palin would raise her children and govern. And co-host Joy Behar told a vulgar joke while showing a video of Palin’s daughter, Bristol, and Bristol’s fiancé.

Goldberg posted a piece on her wow-o-wow Web site titled “Sarah Palin Is a Very Dangerous Woman” in which she accused Palin of wanting “to secede from the United States.”

Whoopi then linked Palin’s speech to a German Nazi rally, writing, “This girl is dangerous to me. This is a very dangerous woman… I just found the whole thing sad and very musty and very much like a Bund rally, but maybe that was just me.”

Judging by the gazillions of Sarah supporters, it appears so, Whoopi.

James Hirsen is a media analyst, Trinity Law School professor, and teacher of mass media and entertainment law at Biola University.