[conservatism_IS_compassion]

If it were merely resisting a POTUS that would be nothing. Instead what is happening is a perfect storm of the accusations mattering for one bunch and hardly at all for another.

The double standard, while not new at all since at least a Democrat was willing to brag about it during Reagan’s tenure, comes when the party that effectively exercises it, protecting its own endlessly while ruthlessly conducting witch hunts, has become a criminal enterprise and also has a complicit, subservient media.

This.

I’ve been cogitating seriously on this issue for the past four decades. If not longer. My conclusions are:

1. The wire services, beginning with the advent of the AP only four years after Samuel Morse's 1844 demo of the Baltimore-Washington telegraph, created national journalism as we know it, and inherently homogenized it. As Adam Smith put it,

   People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

   . . . and the AP “wire” is nothing but a virtual meeting of major journalism outlets.

2. Under the aegis of the wire services, journalism promotes journalism - by a massive propaganda campaign to the effect that “journalism is objective.” But that is not only a sales pitch, it is a shot across the bow of anyone who claims to be a journalist but who dares question the objectivity of any journalist in good standing with the group as a whole. To be in good standing with establishment journalism is to never question any other journalist’s objectivity - and to participate in reading out of the profession anyone who violates that rule. Such person is “not a journalist, not objective.”

3. Commercial - not philosophical but commercial - rules such as “If it bleeds, it leads” cause journalism to seek and promote stories about bad news. In a word, journalism is negative - and journalists all know it.

4. The claim that journalism is objective, therefore, is equivalent to a claim that “negativity is objectivity.” And you show me someone who asserts that, and I’ll show you a cynic. Commercial journalism as we know it is cynical.

5. Blanket cynicism would be incoherent; if “A” and “B” be opposites, cynicism towards “A” is incompatible with cynicism towards “B.” In fact, cynicism towards “A” logically corresponds to naive faith in “B.” In that sense, ironically, cynicism is naive.

6. Per Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, society is a blessing and government a necessary (or worse) evil. Journalism is cynical towards society, and naive towards government. And that combination, I put it to you, is the true definition of “socialism.” The Democrat Party systematically goes along with journalism and, consequently, gets along with journalism very well indeed. It is little if any overstatement to say that while Republicans get libeled very often, Democrats never get libeled.

7. The famous New York Times v. Sullivan decision asserted that to vindicate the First Amendment it was necessary to essentially prohibit government officials from suing for libel. Sullivan was a unanimous ruling by the Warren Court, with enthusiastic concurrences. I have come to the view that it differs from the Rhenquist Court’s Morrison v. Olson decision only in that the Warren Court didn’t have a Justice Scalia. Scalia, new to the court at the time, filed a blistering lone dissent in the Morrison case - an opinion which is now considered the final word on the issue of the legitimacy of Special Counsel.

   The Warren Court erred, IMHO, in extrapolating a decision rejecting the weak specific case of Mr. Sullivan to the general issue while ignoring essentially everything I said above - which was already true in 1964, and has only gotten more obvious. All conservatives revere the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but there was a hidden flaw in the Warren Court’s interpretation of it. Because, as Scalia has said, the First Amendment did not create freedom of the press, and in fact did not change the law at all. Nobody who wanted the Bill of Rights wanted to change the law - they just wanted to prevent the law from being changed. Freedom of the press already existed, and the First Amendment protected that. But libel and pornography laws already existed too - and the First Amendment was crafted so as not to call them into question. And so was the Ninth Amendment.

   The First Amendment protects “the freedom . . . of the press,” not “freedom of the press” generally. The freedom of the press did not, then or now, include the right to libel someone without losing a lawsuit and paying damages. The Ninth Amendment, I put it to you, protects your right to redress if you are libeled even though that right is not articulated explicitly in the Constitution and “freedom . . . of the press” is.

   In sum, Sullivan institutes a regime where “the press” is given carte blanche. Naturally, the press would like it. But the true purpose of freedom of the press is to “let a hundred flowers bloom” - and a regime of law in which Democrats are entitled not only to their own opinions but to their own facts is not that.

   (Note that I said “Democrats don’t get libeled” even though Mr. Sullivan was a Democrat. But he was a southern Democrat - an extinct species now, and an easy target then. No conventional Democrat today would own him - rather, they would hang him, like David Duke, around the necks of the Republicans).

[GOPJ]

The First Amendment protects “the freedom . . . of the press,” not “freedom of the press” generally. The freedom of the press did not, then or now, include the right to libel someone without losing a lawsuit and paying damages.

None of our freedoms allow for actions without consequences... the second allows a person to be armed - but not to shoot another person outside the constraints of law..

[Rurudyne]

Well said.

I would also add, drawing from thinking like this old essay of mine: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1628444/posts

... that the rise of the, as you put it, homogenized press, was a further contraction of the rights of those that acted as the press (when they tried to publish their news/opinion/commentary), transferring it to a profession, and ultimately to those with certain credentials.

It is not the freedom for a profession that was meant, but of the people. The profession is covered because the professional are people and not the other way around.

I would say that the “stewardship” of professional journalists over the right of the free press has been almost as disasterous for the country as the “stewardship” of lawyers over the Law.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1718921/posts