“You do not have the right”
What do you mean by “right?” Are you limiting yourself to legal rights?
“You really have no right whatsoever to demand that others be a certain way. They have a right to be idiotic and wrong.”
They have a legal right, but not a moral right, and you have a moral right to demand that they act right, and a legal right to verbalize those demands.
“It just means nobody is going to throttle you.”
If you start a paper and boldly publish the truth today, you will have the sans culottes howling for your blood before you can say “EIB.” And they won’t stop with howling. They will do you violence.
“Odd, though, that you want to throttle others in the name of “freedom.”
No, not in the name of freedom; in the name of all that is good and decent.
You say that a press is free so long as the government is not repressing it. But what about other elements? If the drug gangsters in Columbia are throttling the press, is it free? If one political faction in this country is significantly restricting the information that appears in te media, are they free?
I guarantee you that if I had the power, the left would be squalling about the lack of a free press — and they would be right, because I would give them no access whatsoever.
The Taliban want to throttle you in the name of all that is good and decent, as does Nancy Pelosi. Do you really aspire to being like them?
Of course there are influences on the quality of the information we receive. But the concept of “freedom” is not applicable, because it relates to the government’s actions. That’s the concept.
Are the capitalist forces aligned toward the left? Yes, but as long as the government doesn’t act like a despot, enforcing its own idea of goodness, then it’s a marketplace of ideas. And if you don’t have the money to compete, you better try to find it so that you can be another voice out there.
The truth seems to me to be that we are blessed with a lot of voices that echo our own ideas of what is good. Let’s be thankful for those — I could name them, but you know who they are. Be grateful that IBD exists, that National Review, American Spectator, and the myriad blogs exist. Don’t join the opposition! Be thankful. Think about creating another alternative, if you want, but don’t ask for government enforcement of “goodness” and decency in the realm of the press. You violate the fundamental precept of our entire society if you do that.
Am I as sick as you of the distortions and the godlessness of the MSM? You bet I am. But forcing people to be good has never worked, as you know. Our appeal to people’s decency has to come from within the system that itself provides for us the freedom to scream from the rooftops what we believe to be true. The other guy has the same right, but if you don’t believe he does, you’re more like him than like me.