"All restrictions on free speech are a bad idea and should be repealed."I'll take the First Amendment please.
I'll have the same - with the caveat that I want the government out of the business of promoting "objectivity" which is nothing more than promoting a self-serving concensus among journalists. And I want a civil suit, if not a RICO suit for triple damages, filed against the MSM for collusion in restraint of the trade in ideas.Rather than naming a vague "Mainstream Media," I would name the Associated Press as defendant in that action. I will not say that I'm sorry it happened, but it is historical fact that the Lincoln Administration hindered rivals of the AP, and the AP self-censored to retain government support. So the AP was a tendentious organization within a dozen years of its 1848 founding.
You are a stone's throw from Durham, the site of the Michael Nifong crusade to keep his job long enough to get the maximum pension by railroading three Duke U. students into prison for a generation.That is relevant to the issue of "ethical restrictions and the mainstream media" because I just finished reading the book Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case by Stuart Taylor, KC Johnson. A major conclusion of which is that the coverage of the case by the MSM in general, and The New York Times in particular, was (and is) absolutely without ethical restraint.
To go by the MSM coverage you would think, according to Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, that Roy Cooper had found the Duke boys guilty rather than exonerating them.
Government and new media (Bloggers scaring the MSM) News and Record ^ | 1/1/07 | John Robinson