Really? Thank you for informing me--what an honor! If people from there are being directed to read this thread, they may perchance actually learn something about the First Amendment. It therefore seems germane to paste in a copy of that much-honored--all too often in the breach--stricture:
Notice if you will, dear reader, that the terms "objectivity" and "truth" appear nowhere in the First Amendment (nor, I warrant, anywhere else in the Constitution). The Constitution forbids the government to assure that speech and the press contain only the truth. That means that the First Amendment protects your opinion from government censorship. It also--and this is a difficult concept for liberals to grasp--protects my opinion from government censorship even if my opinion is not "liberal". Not only so, but the same goes for members of the Flat Earth Society with whom both you and I disagree.
That is the only logical position for the Constitution of our democratic republic to take; if the government were actually able to promulgate only truth and to stamp out error and error only, what point would there be to having elections in which people who might be wrong could overturn the existing perfect government? Yet we-the-people allow the government--in the form of the FCC--to tell us which of our countrymen speak over the government-created airwaves "in the public interest." If the First Amendment is truly properly understood to allow that, why is it also properly understood to forbid the government to make that same decision about newspapers or books?
One or the other of those two understandings is deeply flawed. I say it is the former.
I also say that, however competitive various journalists may be among themselves, they have a remarkable amount in common among themselves as well. And that what they have in common with each other they also, by and large, have in common with liberal politicians and not with conservatives. And if liberal politicians eschew the adoption of policy preferences which diverge significantly from journalistic concensus, any claim of journalists in general to be independent of liberal politicans is moot.
To the extent the journalistic concensus exists to some extent because of external reality conservatives have no need to oppose it--but then, liberal politicians are not about to, either. In such case no controversy exists and journalism would drop the issue from disinterest.
If one blind man touches the elephant's trunk and perceives a snake and another blind man feels the elephant's leg and perceives a tree, their courage to disagree ultimately allows someone to listen to the various reports and infer the elephant itself--the truth, at least approximately. But what if the second blind man--and the third--hearing the first report, each trims his report to avoid contradiction for fear of seeming "biased"? How long will we then "know objectively" that the creature is a snake??
And if a politician knows that you believe the snake hypothesis, is there not political profit in proposing a snake control program whether he himself believes it or not? And will not the blind men and the politicians then make common cause against the person who scents peanut breath and somehow ferrets out the truth?
"Liberalism" is a combination of cowardice and duplicity. It is the ideology of the feckless--the preference for group solidarity over truth. And it calls itself "objectivity."
An amendment, yes--but the first, and part of the block of ten known as "The Bill of Rights"--thus essentially of a piece with the body of the document, in terms of provenance. Interestingly, amendments are superior to the original document--otherwise what would be the point? That is of course an excellent reason for caution in framing an amendment; unintended consequences can't necessarily be trumped by reference to the rest of the Constitution, nor for that matter by earlier amendments.You might want to look at the intention and spirit of your constitution as well - I am quite sure that the Founding Fathers intended it more so that free speech would not be supressed. They would all have a collective heart attack if they could see what successive generations have done to the Constitution and in the name of it. or are you really trying to tell me they would have been all for porno.
I think the topic of censorship came up pretty quickly; Thomas Jefferson said something about "Whose foot is to be the measure . . . ?" in opposition to censorship.You will notice that this posting is a reply, not to the thread from which I quoted your posting, but to a different thread altogether. My own creation, as you'll see by the first essay. A rather quixiotic exercise, some say, in pure First Amendment study, revealing the gap between theory and practice.
(The particular posting to which the "TO 39" button points quotes the First Amendment).
The SCOTUS ruled on this very issue about 35 years ago, in Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC, upholding the constitutionality of FCC regulation of broadcast journalism.
“Yet we-the-people allow the government—in the form of the FCC—to tell us which of our countrymen speak over the government-created airwaves “in the public interest.”
Here, I must insist on inserting a technical issue which mandates gooberment allocation of available frequencies.
Were such allocation not enforced, those frequencies would become a mere babble as all who wished broadcast as they wished in that most undesirable of ‘commons’.
Lest you think I am making a reductio ad absurdum argument, consider that the electronic joke called “Chicken Band”, A.K.A. CB Radio, has become in all too many areas.
Fortunately, radio and TV frequencies can now be split into many more bands, thanks to digital equipment.
And, most importantly, the Internet allows freedom of communication to any who wish to avail themselves of this medium.
When Americans learn to use the Internet, there will be “Truth & Accountability”, to use the favorite phrase of one Walter D. Pine. Between cell phone audio, photo, and video communication capabilities, all will have to regulate their own behavior.
Why? ‘Cause they no longer have the expectation of privacy. Not a problem for the “good” - a living H*ll for the “bad guy”.