Democrat old bull wants to dilute freedom of the Press
Sen. Dick Durbin thinks it’s time for Congress to decide who’s a real reporter. In The Chicago Sun-Times last week, he wrote: “Everyone, regardless of the mode of expression, has a constitutionally protected right to free speech. But when it comes to freedom of the press, I believe we must define a journalist and the constitutional and statutory protections those journalists should receive.”
How do you decide who is a journalist? Essentially, he says, it’s someone who gets a paycheck from a media organization: “A journalist gathers information for a media outlet that disseminates the information through a broadly defined ‘medium’ — including newspaper, nonfiction book, wire service, magazine, news Web site, television, radio or motion picture — for public use. This broad definition covers every form of legitimate journalism.”
Does it really? Everyform? Because, as I write this, most of the information I’m getting from Egypt is being tweeted and blogged by Egyptians and American expats in Egypt. The media organizations are usually hours behind.
Personally, I think a journalist is someone who’s doing journalism, whether they get paid for it or not.
I wouldn’t trust Durbin (or most of his Senate colleagues) to baby-sit my kid. I certainly don’t trust them to decide who counts as a “real” journalist — and, more importantly, who doesn’t.
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11 comments:
This is an interesting topic, even though it's coming from the biggest and most biased liar to ever infect the halls of congress.
Americans know that the Constitution gives almost unlimited protections and rights to the press. We also know that those protections are abused on a daily basis, because of how the MSM manipulates and distorts the "news" so that it fits their leftist agenda.
But here's the question the American people need to ask themselves. "Is there a difference between a journalist (reporter) and an active political operative"? The latter being what most members of the MSM in fact are. Should highly-biased political operatives enjoy those same unlimited protections?
The answer to 2:43 question is "unfortunately, yes".
"Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!"
-Thomas Carlyle
"When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives."
- Robert Heinlein
"A free press can be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom a press will never be anything but bad."
-Albert Camus
"To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves."
-Claude-Adrien Helvétius
"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."
-Noam Chomsky
"The populist authoritarianism that is the downside of political correctness means that anyone, sometimes it seems like everyone, can proclaim their grief and have it acknowledged.
The victim culture, every sufferer grasping for their own Holocaust, ensures that anyone who feels offended can call for moderation, for dilution, and in the end, as is all too often the case, for censorship. And censorship, that by-product of fear - stemming as it does not from some positive agenda, but from the desire to escape our own terrors and superstitions by imposing them on others - must surely be resisted."
-Jonathon Green
"Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he."
-Publilius Syrus
So, what does that make you, Dick?
I wouldn’t trust Durbin (or most of his Senate colleagues) to baby-sit my kid.
Think they were pork chops, he would!
Liberal Fascism once again...
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