Thuggish Censorship of Connecticut newspaper
We read:
"Mayor Eddie A. Perez ratcheted up his campaign against "racist comments and hate speech" posted by readers on Courant.com Friday by holding a protest outside the newspaper's Broad Street headquarters.
Surrounded by a few dozen state and municipal elected officials, members of community organizations and city employees, Hartford's mayor stood in front of The Courant to take it to task.
"Let me begin by making it clear that this is not, this is not about free speech," Perez said. "This is about asking the corporate citizen in our community not to provide a platform for hate and racist material in our community." "Enough is enough," Perez said to applause. "Enough is enough."
The rally comes at the end of a week in which Perez issued two press releases targeting the reader comments, and wrote a letter to the newspaper's publisher demanding that The Courant stop the anonymous postings.
Source
The usual ignorant Leftist claim that "hate speech is not free speech". It looks like the newspaper owner is going to bend to the pressure, though. And what a hero the Mayor must have felt himself to be! Lovely cheap applause.
I have not been able to find what the "hate speech" was but the following comment from a reader of the newspaper may give a clue:
"Don't you people know that you are only supposed to say nice things about Perez and the city of Hartford, anything else you say is racist, hate speech!"
6 comments:
They are correct. If the newspaper requires the letter writers to identify themselves as my local paper does, people will think twice about what they say. This does not prevent free speech, it just requires those attacking someone to identify themselves. If you are embarrassed by what you have written, then maybe you shouldn't write it.
yeah but if the comment is left anonymously doesn't it make that comment like the wind. Just hot air blowing and should be disregarded immediately. Words do nothing, that is the point of free speech. Remember sticks and stones...
This does not prevent free speech, it just requires those attacking someone to identify themselves.
It may not prevent free speech, but it certainly limits it. While there might be a moral obligation to put your name to a post, the fact of the matter is that governmental workers have a history of taking things out on people that are critical of them.
I hate to go "founding fathers" on you, but works such as "Common Sense," and "The Crisis," were published anonymously. The Federalist papers were written by people using nom-de-plumes.
Anonymous postings on a blog or comment section can be nasty and even hateful. Yet whether to allow such postings is at the discretion of the owner of the site.
This is a case where governmental officials - including the mayor of a town - took off from the business of running a city to protest a private entity and to tell that entity how they should conduct business, and how they should regulate speech on their site.
That's scary in many ways.
And he has the audacity to say it's not about free speech! Censoring people who disagree with you is not about free speech? Once again we see that to those on the left, free speech only pertains to what they say....GSP
Hello Good Gentles All!
Hello Gitarcarver!
Well said.
Why should the government want the names except to maintain an enemies list?
Pax,
InFides
or
Silence Dogood
or
Brutus
The whole concept of what this fool of a Mayor wants is ridiculous. He thinks that by denying people the right to express their thoughts in print that they'll stop thinking them as well.
This paper is performing a service to the community by allowing it's unclean elements to expose their thoughts, that way some of them will see their words in print and realize how ridiculous they sound and others can challenge them and engage them in reasoned debate and perhaps truly change their minds.
The Mayor's plan is just a form of denial.
Longview
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