House Democrats, Targeting Right-Wing Cable Outlets, Are Assaulting Core Press Freedoms

"We have the video".... video.....notice that you can only point to one instance from some extremists. I lost track of all the "rule of law" "mostly peaceful protest" riots that happened last summer.

 

I'm not having any trouble with it, Rod; I just don't live in a fantasy world. If you bothered to read my entire post, it began by noting that President Lincoln closed newspapers & jailed publishers.
Lincoln-- just to be sure I haven't lost you-- was President of our country, the UNITED STATES. And, though I wasn't around, I'm reasonably certain the Constitution's wording was the same, including the Amendment you quoted, above. And it didn't make a rat's ass bit of difference. That's REALITY, Rod-- with what part of that are you, "having trouble?"

Maybe this is a simple misunderstanding of you merely thinking the discussion was about ideals, divorced from actual life. Or maybe I mistook the thread for being about a real thing, & not just a hypothetical concept. You could quote me all kinds of things about it being the President's job to faithfully execute the laws, to protect & defend the Constitution & the United States; and I could point to President Johnson lying in order to launch our country into a hot war, or President Trump, watching a riot at the nation's Capitol, on tv, and doing nothing to thwart it.

There are wonderful words about the separation of powers & our system's tripartite government branches, each keeping the others in check; and I could mention that, in an unlawful breaking of a treaty we'd signed, giving a native American tribe some land we didn't think we wanted, while taking their land, American citizens were going onto the reservation & killing Indians because silver, I believe was discovered there. And the Supreme Court of the U.S. ordered then-President Jackson to stop those citizens, so that our nation would be in compliance with our legal treaty (the executive branch's mandate); but Jackson pulled a super-Trump: he did nothing even with the, "Supreme," Court saying that he must. And his punishment for disregarding the Court, defying the balance of powers enshrined in the Constitution? He got his face on the $20 bill!

So we can talk all day about theoretical ideals, if you'd like, Rod, & I think we will find a good bit of agreement between us, or at least more than when usually have on issues. Or we can discuss actual events, circumstances, situations, & potential outcomes. Just make sure we're on the same page, as far as in which of those two we are engaged.

You came into this conversation with your quote about freedom of speech and the press, with which I am, of course, familiar, but which is basically irrelevant, unless you are trying to maintain that, because, "Congress shall make no law ........abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." therefore there currently ARE no laws abridging freedom of the press, or free speech, nor have there ever been. Please let me know if that's the position you wish to argue in favor of. I will have no trouble rattling off EXCEPTIONS to it. Therefore, it should not be beyond any thinking person's understanding that further exceptions are possible, despite your quoting of words, you seem to suggest should be the end of the argument. Well I am a thinking person. Do you care to be one, for the purpose of this discussion? (If so, merely citing an Amendment which has been riddled with holes from past actions & court decisions, isn't going to cut it). Be assured that I know you have the capacity to be a thinking person; all of us are, after all, created equal-- or at least the men are, right?

 

As the poster of the OP, I can affirm that the discussion is about ideals -- and how they are threatened by current hysteria.

 

I'll only add two things. First, that I would hope after all your years in intelligence, seeing tragically messy things that perhaps didn't go as had been anticipated, you noted that there is not always a clear-cut right & wrong, and that how things are seen is very often a matter of perspective; that is, the same act can be either good or bad, not based on morals, but only on where one sits. If so, you should understand that one's degree of confidence in one's judgements beg to be tempered by how aware one is of the other viewpoints, of which there certainly are more, generally at least one, & if you are not aware of it, then the rectitude of your own perspective may very well be in doubt.

This brings me to the second thing I'd like to mention: there are those who, looking at the evidence, would say (& have said) that President Lincoln, after the secession of the Southern states, actively engineered the conflict at Fort Sumter, that is, arranged the necessary pretext to begin that horrible Civil War. Whether or not that is true, is something that may be impossible for anyone other than old Abe to ever know for sure, & certainly the foolhardy machismo of many in the South also gets a share of the blame. But whether or not it was a good or a bad thing for that war to have been fought will never be more than a matter of speculation (because it is impossible to know to what things any alternative course would have led). The Constitution, as far as I am aware, was not a death pact. There was no legal basis to pronounce that states had no right to leave the Union-- doing something rather similar to America's celebrated liberation from Great Britian (which was, BTW, in good measure motivated, at least in many of the original leaders, by concerns that England would outlaw slavery in the colonies, as it had recently done in Britian-- oh, how thick, the irony)-- though Lincoln had resolved not to allow that secession to occur.

Now add to that, abnegating Constitutional freedom of the Press, due to a War which he may have purposely brought about, and President Lincoln begins to appear as quite the tyrant. If you will grant, for the sake of argument or, if I may call it so, in pursuit of freedom of thought, that what assumptions one makes regarding all the unknowable details about Lincoln can legitimately, & drastically, alter one's perception of him and of the things he did, then perhaps you can appreciate that today's Democratic legislators obviously view the threat posed by propaganda, masquerading as news, differently than you do. And, should humility be one of your qualities, you must admit that you cannot know, any better than they, where the current state of affairs will lead, either with or without remediation.

Under those circumstances, while you could certainly argue that you believe the Democrats are being alarmist, & are over-reacting, it is nevertheless difficult for me to see how you could assert, instead, with such certainty, that their intentions are bad, & that they are only using this situation as a pretext to exercise their true, authoritarian desires.
Can you see my point?

 

That was not my point. I am clearly speaking above your ability to comprehend, if you believed that was the gist of my argument. Maybe you have a friend who's a good enough reader to Cliff Note my post for you?

 

How they are threatened in real life, as I took it; or what the Democrats could hope to accomplish based on a literal (yet, of course blind to the contradictions that existed around the people who wrote those lovely words), and idealized notion of what the Constitution says, being unmalleable, & controlling all actions, as RodB's post seems to suggest he believes is the case? Because if it is the latter, it's hard to guess the reason for this thread, in the first place. But no matter, you could now end it, if all you were after was what the Constitution says about freedom of the press, interpreting it with the most utopian vision in mind, while simultaneously excusing all the times the text did not prevent unapproved things from occurring-- nevertheless certain, for whatever reason, that nothing like that could happen in this situation.

But somehow, I have a feeling you already knew the gist of the Constitution's words on press freedom. Still, you started the thread because you realized that was no guarantee, am I right? So then the reason for my post is to demonstrate there was no reason, whatsoever, for your reply to my prior post, which had been directed toward someone else.

So that it won't be a complete waste, I'll end with a wise saying of Yogi Berra's, that seems appropriate.

There is no difference between theory & practice-- in theory.
In practice, there is.

 

I guess that explains your first line and the whataboutism

 

In the wake of the financial crisis that caused the global recession I recall Alan Greenspan's mea culpa with regard to his belief in the self regulating nature of free markets.

Flaw in Free Markets: Humans

Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand, which says that market forces harness self-serving behavior for the common good, assumes that markets are competitive, and most markets have in fact become more competitive over time. Today, if an opportunity exists anywhere in the world, information-age entrepreneurs can seize it more quickly than ever.

The invisible hand, however, requires not just strong competition but also two other preconditions. The economic models that spawned Mr. Greenspan’s former optimism simply assume those conditions, despite compelling evidence of their absence.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/business/economy/13view.html

The media analog to the theory market forces harness self-serving behavior for the common good is the notion outlets like OANN, Newsmax, and Faux would fail. Fail because they are not in the business of informing their audience, which is for the common good. They are in the business of getting people to believe in things that are not true. Like the election was stolen from Trump. The "invisible hand" is supposed to snuff them out. Why has there been a failure of a self regulating media market? Humans. As it turns out, many of us like sensationalism more than rationality, infotainment more than information, and titillation more than plain vanilla facts. It's why conservative talk radio thrives.

I don't have much respect for those who hide under the umbrella of free speech while defending media outlets for lying. For broadcasting falsehoods they know to be false for the sake of ratings. Because the damage done can be tremendous. It's one thing to have opinions about politics. Clearly there should be no consequence for a media outlet expressing the opinion Trump was the better candidate in 2020. But broadcasting lies about election fraud that end up threatening the existence of our fragile democracy?

The dilemma is what to do about it in a marketplace that is not self-regulating? In an instance where the public does not make wise and informed choices leading to the common good. The common good not being whether Dems or Repubs control government. The common good being that a candidate who lost a presidential election not be installed as President by way of overt propaganda.

 

Erudite post but a bit convoluted and misses the point. The original point was if congress can pass laws that prohibit broad categories of speech and press carte blanche, not if there can be certain very specific and limited exceptions to the constitution's 1st amendment. There are laws that so provide such limits. However, they are very few and far between, very specific and explicit, and (almost?) all tested and adjudicated. The issue here is congress considering outlawing all speech and media that disagrees with the Democrat party over a variety of wide positions like conservative political viewpoints, support of Trump, so-called denying global warming catastrophes, etc. Of course it would be too obvious and blatant to label what they are doing with these words, so they subtly, about as subtle as a train wreck, euphemistically call it "misinformation" because this word has a much nicer sounding and benign ring to it. Of course it never crossed their autocratic minds nor gave it a second's thought that outlawing all "misinformation" would be just as unconstitutional. Besides, I don't think this concerns them much.

Call it what they may, this is just one more prong in the plans of the left and the Democrats to dismantle the Constitution piece by piece and cement their absolute power in place in perpetuity.

What Lincoln did or did not do is irrelevant. He was getting rid of slavery in a time when the Supreme Court had just ruled that, constitutionally, slaves were property and not citizens..

 

Was it? The assertion made by Greenwald is Dems in Congress are bullying media outlets for broadcasting things they don't agree with. Not even two months into their reign as the majority party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress, key Democrats have made clear that one of their top priorities is censorship of divergent voices. On Saturday, I detailed how their escalating official campaign to coerce and threaten social media companies into more aggressively censoring views that they dislike.

It's the same disingenuous argument made by conservative posters on the board........and it is patently false. "Censoring views they dislike" is plainly a lie. Trying to hold accountable those outlets allowing their platforms to spew dangerous lies or producing content themselves amounting to lies is the accurate way of describing what is going on.

 

Yeah, I know. That's what they say........wink/wink.....

 

So......in order to justify Greenwald's specious argument you are forced to attribute to Congress things you assume they want to do but not what they are actually doing. Got it.

 

Well the insult aside, it was actually the first line

 

Your point seems to me to be largely based on a "Lost Cause" conspiracy theory. No sale.

 

Sorry, but I could not find your point.

 

It’s Glen being Glen. He’s been tying himself self righteous alarmists knots for decades.

 

I made, I hope you will agree, an earnest effort to explain my point, delineate the logical line, in detail; I am not well-versed, however, in the particular cant of political discourse that throws original conceptualizations about contemporary situations into buckets, categorized with names like, "Lost Cause conspiracy theory." Would you be so kind as to take the trouble to simply state in non-indoctrinated English, what you are saying, in reply to my post to you? (It would be nice for me to know that you at least followed & correctly understood my argument, in case it could use more clarification; that is not clear, from your response.)

 

So did your president Wilson.. that doesn't make it right.

 

You butted into a conversation in which you had nothing to offer. Is that clear enough for you?

RodB replied to me that my idea that conspiracy theories could be (not prohibited, of course, but only) disqualified from being called, "News," was moot, because of the 1st Amendment to the Constitution. My reply to him was basically saying that real life is not so cut & dried as simply an absolutist reading of the words in that document. I suggested the inconsistency, from the get-go, in the, "all men are created equal," line, for instance. I also pointed out that exceptions already have been accepted by the SCOTUS to his reading of the Constitution, regarding free speech, and freedom of the press. Hence, his argument was moot, if he wished to discuss the real world, as opposed to some idealized concept of our country which is incapable, in deed, from straying from a literal reading of the Constitution's words. Are you still with me, sport?

So your coming in, I suppose imagining yourself as RodB's champion, or at least somehow defending him, was misguided. We ALL realize that we are discussing what could be called, "ideals," but I-- and, I assumed, you-- were trying to discuss their application, in our current situation; i.e., not as a strictly hypothetical exercise. If that is the way you see your thread, your comment was utterly unnecessary & contributed nothing that was not already completely understood.

If, however, your thread's intent had been to approach the subject merely from RodB's angle, then the thread was now finished, since he had supplied the definitive answer to the question: the Constitution says the government can restrict neither speech nor the press, period. No exceptions listed in the original Amendment; so if we're going to ignore the practical application of the concept, through time, we're done. And I obviously, then, would have mistaken your thread's intent.

Still lost?

 

It is both ridiculous and bizarre to claim that Lincoln engineered Ft. Sumter to initiate the Civil War. That does indeed put your argument in a bucket.

 

You are correct: the mistake was yours. There is only one way to apply freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

 

Before you embarrass yourself further perhaps you should inform yourself.

https://www.historynet.com/lincoln-chooses-war-1861.htm

 

If you actually believed that you wouldn't have started this thread.
Democrats are not at all trying to suppress truth as you are implying....
they are trying to stop the lies being spread by extremists.

 

The question being how is free speech defined.

https://www.uscourts.gov/about-fede...ational-outreach/activity-resources/what-does

 

1. Formation of the Confederacy was an illegitimate, treasonous act.
2. Refusal to "compromise" with treason is simply fulfillment of the President's oath.