Journalists Mobilize Against Free Speech
Read the whole thing, but following are a few excerpts.
Motivated by self-dealing arrogance and venality, the Maim Scream Media™ has a goal.
That goal is reducing the Bill of Rights to a single clause. Here’s Steve Coll, two-time Pulitzer winning dean of Columbia Journalism School:
“Those of us in journalism have to come to terms with the fact that free speech, a principle that we hold sacred, is being weaponized against the principles of journalism.”
Translated, “Free speech is only sacred when we utter it. We are actually the “sacred” part.” The fact that virtue beaconing, click baiting partisans already wield journalism as a weapon against freedom of religion (unless the religion is environmentalism or social justice), speech (if they disagree with it), press (any competition), assembly (of the non-SJW kind), and petitioning the government (regarding election fraud, abortion, or firearms, for example) seems petty in comparison to the journalists’ sacred calling, right?
To paraphrase Monty Python, “Gentlemen, you can’t have a free conscience here, this is journalism class.”
“When I was a journalist, I loved Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s assertion that the Constitution and the First Amendment are not just about protecting ‘free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate,’” wrote [Richard] Stengel, the undersecretary of state for public affairs and public diplomacy during the second Obama administration. “But as a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier.”
Outlier? This used to be called exceptionalism. And Stengel should look up “championing,” too.
“All speech is not equal,” Stengel writes. “And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails.”
Some speech is more equal than other speech. And I’m sure Stengel has in mind just the right people to guard the guardrails.
And then we have Masha Gessen at the New Yorker:
“The news media have traditionally borne the responsibility for insuring that the actual purpose of the First Amendment is fulfilled,” they write. “Yet Americans are content to leave this essential component of democracy to profit-driven corporations with next to no regulatory oversight.”
Very clever. Pretending the New Yorker seeks no profit and bashing capitalism, arrogating the purpose of the 1st Amendment to the New Yorker, and making regulation of the competition seem a disinterested, and holy, quest – all in one clueless sentence. Or, maybe it’s a plea for nationalization of the “real journalists.” Except that they would then get their ‘fair’ share of the filthy lucre laundered by taxpayers, it’s hard to imagine what would be different.
Now come Anand Giridharadas and Oliver Darcy; seeking rent.
Giridharadas is an “MSNBC talking head, New York University journalism professor, and former New York Times writer, Vice talk-show host, and Aspen Institute fellow.”
CNN reporter Darcy was “promoting a CNN segment dedicated to the urgent issue of throwing other cable networks off television.”
[Giridharadas-] “It’s time for this question to be front and center: Should Fox News be allowed to exist?. Brain-mashing as a business model shouldn’t be legal.”
[Darcy-] “Just a reminder that neither @Verizon, @ATT, nor @comcast have answered any questions about why they beam channels like OAN & Newsmax into millions of homes. Do they have any second thoughts about distributing these channels given their election denialism content? They won’t say.”
I’d favor just letting Fox self-immolate and let people use their remotes to change channels.
But, Parler wasn’t the end of this.