Don’t worry — I can take it. In fact, I thoroughly enjoy making others think.
This is not a time to be soft, either in body or mind, and some of the knee-jerk blabber by both right and left needs to be challenged.
If we truly do believe in the Constitution, in the rights it protects and the principles it advances, then we must defend all of it, not just what suits us at the moment.
LOL! Where do you do that?
Posting a contrary opinion on FR usually just makes a stink instead of making people think.
Well said. Rights are not rights unless they belong to us all.
A newspaper is a business, however, and though we may have that unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, there is no guarantee of success. Newspapers are fast fading from the landscape because of many different reasons. Content is only one.
This has nothing at all to do with First Amendment rights, or lack thereof any more than the plummeting sales of Dixie Chicks albums did when they shot their mouths off.
To equate the death of a newspaper due to shrinking customer base or poor management as a suppression of free speech is to miss the point entirely, and to contrast the desire of some to keep and bear arms with the publication of a newspaper for profit is erroneous.
There is no First Amendment right to make money by publishing a newspaper or running a radio talk show. There is a First Amendment right to engage in both of those activities, but that is superseded by the requirement that you pay by your own means to do it. I know the NPR crowd, and the Fairness Doctrine advocates think otherwise, but their positions are not valid.
I personally detest the New York Times, and I do feel they have endangered national security partly for a few pieces of Judas Silver, and partly out of partisan political motivation. Are their cases where freedom of speech is not absolute? Yes, there are, and that limitation has been in and out of the Supreme Court many times over the years. There are times I thought the NYT should have been punished for things they published.
But I, and most conservatives are not interested in seeing the government get involved in closing down newspapers, radio stations or television stations just because they happen to be liberal 80% of the time and we disagree with them.
However, it is sweet to see them lose money hand over fist as they bungle their attempts at the very type of thing they attack from their socialist leaning perches most often, the free market. I can guarantee you right now, there is a large portion of those institutions that are stupid enough right now to wish they were government funded. As usual, they can’t think beyond stage one (as Thomas Sowell would put it) and see the ramifications of that.
In any case, you cannot frame this in a morally relativistic frame as “...knee-jerk blabber by both right and left...” because it isn’t. You may take offense at the un-Christian aspect of taking pleasure in the misfortune of others, but you cannot present this in any way as a First Amendment or Constitutional issue, because that is simply wrong. It is a capitalist free market issue.