[conservatism_IS_compassion]

1. It would be no different from NPR or PBS if they did. And actually of a piece with the assignment of radio channel broadcast licenses on the premise that the broadcaster will "serve the public interest" by broadcasting Associated Press journalism. And of a piece with McCain-Feingold limits on who can criticize politicians at election time.

2. All of the above would be recognized as being unconstitutional by any mind not clouded by the propaganda to the effect that "the freedom of the press" refers to privileges of Associated Press journalism specifically.

   Journalism as we know it does not trace back to the time of the ratification of the First Amendment, but only to the founding of the Associated Press in 1848. The openly partisan and fiercely independent "newspapers" of the founding era would never have countenanced, let alone promoted, the idea that a competing newspaper was objective. And, lacking a source of news not in principle accessible to the general public by any other means than reading the newspapers, founding era newspapers were more about political commentary than about news. The dominance of the monopolistic (found in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1945) Associated Press reversed all of that, creating journalism as we know it.

   "The freedom of the press" in the First Amendment properly should be understood as the right of the people, not any special privilege of the members of the Associated Press, to spend money to apply technology to their efforts to promote their own political (and other) opinions. To assign that freedom to specific individuals rather than to the people would be to make "the press" into a title of nobility in violation of Section 9 of Article I. And since Section 8 of Article 1 specifically gives the government the authority "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries," limiting the meaning of "the press" to the literal Eighteenth Century printing press arbitrarily assumes that the ratifiers of the First Amendment intended to limit their own and their posterity's freedom to use new communication technology (and which technology specifically? The radio but not the high speed printing press? The television but not the telephone? The internet but not the photocopier?).

The Bill of Rights was intended as a minimal accounting of the rights of the people. To restrict freedom of the press to specific people or to specific communications technology is to abuse the First Amendment by using it as a ceiling, rather than a floor, on the rights of the people.

The Right to Know

[E.G.C.]

BTTT

[dalereed]

everyone keeps talking about NPR and in my 71 years I have yet to find it on a radio, not that I would listen to it just like PBS is off limits in this house.

[PGalt]

Thanks for the ping/post/link. Very good thread. Thanks to all contributors.

[T Lady]

'I can't imagine a free press propped up by the federal government. But there were not many people who had sympathy for the press, telling me 'you people deserve it,' or 'you made your bed, liberal media,'" Mr. McClellan said. "Journalists are a lot less popular than auto workers."'

Yes, you are, Mr. McClellan, and for a rather obvious reason which you did have the decency to state.

...And at least the auto workers actually make some products Americans actually like and can use. This is definitely not the case with an organization that went out of its way to get an unelectable politician elected while viciously attacking a far more suitable statesperson, whose character you all continue to assassinate to this day.