“The Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to bare the secrets of government and inform the people… The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.” – Hugo Black, American politician and jurist.
As First Amendment quotes go, this one is a beauty. The amendment itself is beauty, but do we love it enough? Do we protect it as though all of our freedoms depend on it?
In Portland, reporter Scott Dolan sat stunned as a court judge instructed the press on what they could and could not report.
In Maryland, a city councilor huffily threatened to sue a reporter just for using his name in print.
In France, a dozen people were gunned down at a weekly magazine, reportedly in response to their publication of a satirical cartoons of the prophet Mohammad.
In the United Kingdom, a fellow will be shut down and publicly derided for making off-color Tweets. In Saudi Arabia, they’ll flog you for it. Or worse.
Let me be clear. A society without a free press is doomed.
Today, the news is dominated by a national mainstream media owned by massive corporations who are all to eager to control the message. Are you tuning in night after night to MSNBC? CNN? Fox? Maybe you should at least look into the matter of who controls them, and then ponder the question of whether they are allowed to tell you all that there is to tell.
Politically vibrant corporations have the power to turn major news networks into propaganda machines that spew the company line like trained parrots.
To be sure, there are still plenty of newspapers and TV news outfits that report the day’s events with careful objectivity – not all news sources have succumbed to political or corporate pressures. There is a wealth of information through independent media sources, too, but don’t get cozy with that relationship.
Even now, the behemoth FCC is mulling a proposal that would grant fast track web access to those who can afford it, a move that would provide great advantage to the corporations who already manage to filter what is presented as news. The little guy – that’s you and I if you’re keeping track – would compete at a vast disadvantage, our voices drowned out by the roar of Titans. Net neutrality, which provides a level playing field across the web, could be gone with one federal ruling and a flick of a few switches.
Everywhere you look, the free press is under attack. It isn’t only venal politicians and bureaucrats serving the needs of the bankers they work for, it’s average people who earnestly believe they are doing good things for mankind. The PC Police, in other words, those who arduously try to limit our opinions and vocabularies by seeing racism and hate around every corner. Brown bag lunch? Racist. White Christmas? Racist. Pop-Tart chewed into the shape of a gun? Potential terrorist, let’s throw the kid out of school.
Real attempts are being made to whittle our right to unalloyed opinion down to nothing. Speak out about immigration, gun control, home schooling, the police state, Obamacare or the joys of Christmas and you’ll be accused of persecuting this group or promoting violence against that one. And then someone will suggest a law or two to make sure you don’t do it again.
The trick is to insist upon a free and unrestrained press even when it’s hard; especially when it’s hard.
Horrors like the attack in France open the door for more Draconian measures – if all this carnage resulted from a publisher’s stance on Islam, maybe the press shouldn’t be allowed to do that anymore. Maybe there should be more rules governing what can and cannot be reported.
It’s the kind of move tyrants love. Do you know what Hitler did right away when his Nazi government was just a crazed upstart taking over Germany? He bought up the newspapers and radio stations, and the ones he didn’t buy, he stifled completely. It’s what tyrants do. They control information and thus, they control you.
When people act out of fear, they sacrifice liberty for safety. The Associated Press, in reaction to the massacre in Paris, is removing photos from its database that might be offensive to Islam. That might be the safe thing to do, but is it the right thing?
Chris Lyons, a recent U.S. Senate candidate and member of the group Maine for Liberty, has thoughts on the matter.
“Removal of the freedom of the press and freedom of speech by the government, two pillars of a free and prosperous society, ensures a tyrannical government, a shackled society of individuals just like China, Nazi Germany and USSR,” he says. “Creativity, expression, music, art and theater were crushed under these regimes because the message could be subversive to the ruling government.
“Knowledge is power,” Lyons says. “The press has been under attack by the very government that is to ensure freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Laws of political correctness, what to print and not what to print because it will incur the wrath of the current powers that be, are illegal. They are unconstitutional.”
If you can’t count on the media to cast light on the doings of our elected leaders, what do you have? Darkness, that’s what, the kind of darkness that causes nations to crumble and totalitarian governments to rise from the heap like poisonous weeds.
And yet only in small private circles are people talking about this. There are debates every minute of every day about the Second Amendment and you hear more and more about encroachments on the Fourth. And that’s good! Keep debating it because we need all of those rights.
Maybe the First Amendment is less sexy, or maybe it’s simply taken for granted because it worked so well for so long. But it’s eroding, and if we allow it to erode further, the darkness that falls will be forever; darkness and the hellish whistle of truth being sucked into the memory hole.
Don’t accept obvious talking points at face value. Demand more from your media and maintain a healthy skepticism. To do otherwise is to risk utter doom.
“If freedom of speech is taken away,” George Washington said on the matter, “then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
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