Posted on 12/08/2012 3:26:23 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Who could object to something that sounds as nice as a "Royal Charter"? With echoes of Magna Carta and Royal proclamations spreading cheer, the term is almost soothing: medieval but in a good way. "My liege, the herald is here at the drawbridge with the new Royal Charter." "Oh excellent news, please show the fellow in."....
[SNIP]
.....The difficulty with a Royal Charter is that it brings the press within the orbit of the government and Parliament as surely as statute does. Once a decade, the government – in theory parliament but in effect government – would decide whether or not to renew or withhold the Royal charter. It isn't difficult to imagine, once politicians get going with this power, it becoming quite a politicised process, open to manipulation in the middle of the next panic. If that raises even the possibility that the hand of a paper or editor be stayed when it is working on an expose of the government of the day then it should be obvious that a Royal Charter is a non-starter. The government might be in a foul mood with the press ahead of renewal, something that could have a chilling effect in parts of the Press....
The problem is as it was, something which is clearly understood in the US but not, it seems, by many British politicians. For a press to be free it cannot be sanctioned, licensed or approved by authority and the state, even if it is only once a decade.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
More bad ideas imported from the European Union. They actually allowed the EU to steamroll over habeas corpus (from the Magna Carta) by acceding to trials in absentia. The EU is gradually dismantling freedom and inserting “Code Napoleon” (guilty until proven innocent) over all its member states.
I don’t think this is about the EU, its about the recent phone-hacking scandal, in which many sections of the press behaved abominably.
However, as many have already pointed out, pretty much everything that they did wrong was already illegal, but the law was not enforced.
Our first two amendments are hills to die on.
Plain people can read plain English, without the “help” of SCOTUS or the UN or any other governing body.
Free speech. Private firearms. Take them from me, and it’s war. That’s why I write fiction that deliberately pushes the envelope. As long as I’m free to write and sell the kind of stuff I write, I’ll consider that we still have free speech. Ditto with my guns. When they try to take either away, they have crossed the Rubicon, they have fired on Fort Sumter.
Too bad the silly Brits never won a Bill of Rights from their lords and masters.
The press we have today is not a free press.
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