[conservatism_IS_compassion]

If it means the end of annoying ‘news anchors’. Now we are talking sense.

Question: If you get paid to promote propaganda on the MSM - is it FREE SPEECH??

Before the advent of broadcasting, the Associated Press acclimated America to the ridiculous conceit that someone claiming to be objective should be taken seriously.

Membership in the AP means you can never be attacked for tendentiousness by another journalist without being defended by the AP and its membership. So in that sense there isn’t free speech in journalism in any medium. The AP was found to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act back in 1945, but back then the AP’s mission of transmitting the news while conserving communication bandwidth seemed to make it “too big to fail.” Now, of course, bandwidth is dirt cheap, so that mission is obsolete - and the idea that the newspapers are in their rights to openly collude against the public is on pretty shaky ground.

I eagerly look forward to the day when Associated Press journalism steps on the wrong toes and the AP and all its members get sued jointly and severally. I hope George Zimmerman will get wind of the idea, and take Big Journalism to the cleaners.

There is no such thing as free speech in broadcasting - in the sense that there is no way to license free speech, but all broadcasters are licensed. IMHO that is also a scandal.

[GeronL]

There is nothing in the Constitution that gives more free speech rights to the “press” than anyone else.

[darrellmaurina]

I had to look twice to see if the date on this was April 1. I could see garbage like this being introduced by a single idiotic elected official and then getting buried in committee, but for this to be a serious bipartisan proposal strains my imagination.

This is so utterly and ridiculously unconstitutional that it should be thrown out of court in ten seconds flat. The Nazi march in Skokie clearly established that precedent and it would take a Supreme Court decision to overturn at least three decades of crystal-clear precedent to make this even remotely possible. Why do some Arizona legislators want to spend taxpayer money to litigate something that's virtually sure to fail?

GeronL is right — the First Amendment was designed to protect precisely this kind of offensive “hate speech.” The only way to prevent something like the Skokie march would be to use charges of treason, which might have been a good idea, but it's almost impossible to prove that somebody is committing treason without actual or imminent domestic armed insurrection or providing aid and comfort to a foreign power hostile to the United States. Today, we might be able to get away with banning some types of Islamofascism but even that would be difficult.

conservatism_IS_compassion has an interesting point about the Associated Press. I'm not sure the AP is going to be in existence in anything resembling its current form for many more years. The leftists seem to have failed with CurrentTV and Air America and similar models, but they are quickly becoming technically sophisticated with things like Huffington Post and Daily Kos and that's probably the future of liberal media. The Associated Press is so large that I suspect they'll find a way to remain in existence in some way, but probably just as one provider of content among many, or as a true news-share cooperative.