FCC Chief Diversity Officer: Conservative Talk Radio Has "Rolled Back" Civil Rights

Jillian Bandes | August 31, 2009 8:52 AM

CNS News keeps digging up juicy stuff on this guy. In 1998, Mark Lloyd, chief diversity officer at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), claimed that “The civil rights agenda has given way to the agenda of the commercial market," but then gave a very plausible explanation as to why that had happened. It's because "[R]ecent research suggests that media content is driven much more by demand considerations (i.e., consumer preferences) than supply factors (i.e., owner preferences).”

In other words, people aren't as concerned with perpetuating the government's entirely arbitrary and ultimately harmful civil rights agenda because they're more concerned with preventing their stations from going bankrupt. It's clear Lloyd has never come close to owning a business in his life.

That's not the end of his off-the-wall comments. In the same paper, he also wrote:

Access to capital remains one of the most significant impediments to ownership for minorities.

Huh? Access to capital remains one of the most significant impediments to ownership for anyone looking to start a radio station or, uh, conduct commerce generally. Why doesn't this guy just write a communist manifesto? Well, he has:

[I]n order to change ownership patterns we need to either change the aggregate distribution of wealth or otherwise increase access to capital markets.

Glenn Beck has already unearthed gobs of information proving that Lloyd is a communist, but hearing these sorts of statements will never stop reinforcing the need to fight that ideology.