Posted on 10/17/2016 7:26:44 AM PDT by Lorianne
The reason we know about these leaks is the common thread among them the willingness of the media to publish what was apparently stolen. Hence the question: Can the government hold the press liable criminally or civilly for the publication of known stolen materials that the public wants to know about? In a word: No.
Here is the back story.
When Daniel Ellsberg, an outside contractor working in the Pentagon, stole a secret study of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam in 1971, which revealed that President Lyndon Johnson had lied repeatedly to the public about what his military advisers had told him, the Department of Justice secured an injunction from U.S. District Judge Murray Gurfein, sitting in Manhattan, barring The New York Times from publishing what Ellsberg had turned over to Times reporters. Such an injunction, known as a "prior restraint," is exceedingly rare in American legal history.
This is so largely because of the sweeping language of the First Amendment "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" as well as the values that underlie this language. Those values are the government's legal obligation to be accountable to the public and the benefits to freedom of open, wide, robust debate about the government debate that is informed by truthful knowledge of what the government has been doing.
Those underlying values spring from the Framers' recognition of the natural right to speak freely. The freedom of speech and of the press had been assaulted by the king during the Colonial era, and the Framers wrote a clear, direct prohibition of such assaults in the initial amendment of the new Constitution.
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
Maybe, but with our current “truly biased” enemedia, we will never know...
Maybe, but with our current “truly biased” enemedia, we will never know...
Let me know the minute we get one.
Good idea - that's just what we need.
Instead of the band of slobbering rump-swabs we now have.
Is not 95% of the “free press” at this time violating the !st Amendment???
!=1...
Pity we do not have one Judge.
Government and freedom are opposed to each other because the very definition of political freedom is absence of unrestrained government and the absence of unjust and invalid laws, and government HATES restraint.
That is also why government HATES the Constitution because the Constitution is the only legal bulwark of freedom against the government. The Constitution protects our freedoms by its legal restraint and limitation on governmental power which, again, government hates.
If WE THE PEOPLE and the STATES do not see that the Constitution is enforced against the government (the feds) and determinedly keep the feds confined to its constitutionally delegated and limited powers, then government will exercise as much unconstitutional power as it can which is by definition tyranny which is essentially what we have now.
Guess Beitbart and Hastings were a tad worse than an inconvenience to the government.
They’re not really “free” are they?
A responsible press would be nice.
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