There’s vast irony in quoting Obama in the context of democracy and press freedoms, when his administration was markedly hostile to the news media.
''This is an administration that prosecutes people for leaking information to the press that would hold it accountable, and which continually obfuscates journalists’ and citizens’ efforts to extract any information from it at all.
This is an administration that claimed, repeatedly, that emails to and from former deputy assistant secretary of state Philippe Reines did not exist – only to finally reveal that thousands of them did, several years and one lawsuit later.
This is an administration that has used the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers at least seven times. By contrast, before Obama’s presidency, the act, in place since the first world war, was used to prosecute government officials who leaked to the media just three times.
This is an administration that has gone after journalists who report on information obtained from leakers by secretly obtaining months’ worth of phone records. That spent seven years trying to compel the New York Times’ James Risen to reveal his sources. That snooped through Fox News’ James Rosen’s private emails and accused the reporter of possibly being a “co-conspirator” in order to get a warrant to do so, and to then keep that warrant secret.
This is an administration that has made it exceedingly difficult for journalists to obtain information from even health and science agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of Agriculture…‘’
The best cure for ‘‘disinformation’’ from news outlets is counteracting it with facts and scathing analysis.
That is true, they only get to regulate broadcast media, which is exactly what i am proposing. But again, their regulating has not been a big issue.
You guys are suggesting horrible alarmist what-ifs if the Govt gets to regulate free speech, and it’s been happening for decades, the biggest issue is Janet Jackson’s nip slip.
Modding:
This quotes you copied and linked to do nothing to support your conclusion and therefore are a hijack of the thread. Stop doing that. No warning issued.
Um, Hari? I was addressing two different posts. In the latter case I was responding to the lengthy Obama interview cited in post #12 including this exchange:
I regret being insufficiently psychic to realize that Boycott’s post was not a hijack but that my reacting to it was.
I say know your enemy. Watch what you want to watch and make your own judgement. I’m not afraid of the information that they are spreading. Discourse is needed to keep you on your toes. Who would be the arbiter? You should be your own.
I think the fundamental thing is that broadcast networks (i.e. the Big 3, UHF and Radio) are broadcast, meaning that you don’t have to do anything other than turn on the set and tune it in.
Cable and internet aren’t broadcast. You both have to pay for access, and seek the content out specifically in most cases.
So while various sorts of “obscene” stuff is readily available, it’s more in the context of outlets that are effectively unregulated by the FCC in the first place. You don’t see much, if any of that kind of thing on broadcast channels, even inside/outside certain hours.
And the broadcast spectrum, being a public finite common resource, has to be allocated and franchised in order to function usefully; and the federal government as custodian of that public resource can impose conditions on such franchise such as to serve the public interest and not offend community morals.
I tend to fall on the side of Roderick_Femm on this issue. And even then there is the matter that has been mentioned earlier, that the time for a strong antitrust position on news media was really a while back. By now in too many locations what would have been the local media are gone and they’d have to be recreated from jackscratch – which may just not happen.
Perhaps…perhaps…we have reached a moment where we need to reform the whole concept of what constitutes “broadcast” and should fall under reasonable regulation. ISTM that long ago the broadcast airwaves spectrum was all that existed, and was therefore licensed and regulated. Then, along came cable, and internet, and everyone just threw up their hands and said, “Well, they are not broadcast, in our antiquated definition, so anything goes!” Of course this happened because legislatures were entices by the cable and internet media company to keep their hands off. Rather, an opportunity was missed. Technology created new means, and old regulations did not keep up.
So, if the original regulatory apparatus was good enough for what existed at the time of only “broadcast” media, why not loop in new media platforms? Or at least apply a principle of trying to do that in good faith?
This seems to be an issue with a whole host of subjects - Regulatory approaches to a subject > Something new comes along > Oh well! Can’t do anything about it! > Unintended negative consequences.
But the original FCC laws and regs on broadcast were very controversial and stood on very shaky constitutional ground.
The reason (or excuse depending on your POV) that let them survive challenge was that the airwaves were an inherently finite natural resource that had to be regulated in the common interest lest it be squandered. And it was arguably a resource terra nullius that therefore as a matter of centuries-old legal practice inherently belonged to the government, not to any random claimant.
The internet, and cable, are practically infinite, man-made resources. There is no argument about terra nullius nor about finiteness. So regulations beyond technological standards are on extremely shaky ground.
If we had no First Amendment Congress would clearly have the right to regulate. But there is so there isn’t.
I agree. It’s gonna be brutal and the Democrats are not fighting back, just whining and not winning much. FIGHT BACK! Expose the truth with a vengeance dammit! So frustrating
Because we do have to regulate “broadcast” and assign bandwidths and keep others from overwhelming those assigned bandwidths. Thus, since a bandwidth is a limited thus a valuable thing, we can decide who gets what, primarily on first come first serve yes, but as stations close, etc someone has to regulate it or i’d be a unusable madhouse.
This is why SCOTUS allows the fCC to censor broadcast shows. They pay a fee, have a license, etc.
Not so with internet blogs, cable Tv and so forth.
It’s really frequency blocks. In other words, the electromagnetic spectrum is divided up into various frequency bands, and the government regulates access to those bands. For example, 470-512 mhz is allocated for UHF TV stations 14-20, and 1559-1610 mhz is reserved for satellite navigation (GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, etc…)
The government has to regulate those things because you don’t want some clown making his wireless toilet flusher run on the same frequencies and cause interference with say… flood control monitoring equipment, or wireless medical telemetry equipment. Or in a more commercial sense, you don’t want your duly licensed radio and TV stations interfered with by other products’ emissions.
Internet and cable are mostly outside of this scheme, especially when physical connections are concerned- a fiber internet connection doesn’t emit RF signals, so the FCC doesn’t have any real reason to regulate it. And where there are RF networks being used, they are regulated by the FCC insofar as they have to stay in the frequency bands allocated to it- WiFi networks are allocated a slice of the RF spectrum, for example, and that’s why they periodically change channel within it- other people’s networks can overlap yours.
I just want to jump back in and say thank you for the technical explanation of broadcast technology. That is helpful in understanding the distinction vs. cable and internet.
The ultimate catch is that if I go and get the right permits and easements and whatever, there’s nothing stopping me from laying my own private cable to my buddy’s house for us to play video games over. There would be no reason or need for the FCC or government to regulate that, outside of making sure I was sticking to the regulations regarding the laying/running of cable in proper easements. The actual traffic is none of their business.
An ISP isn’t any different, except that it’s on a much larger scale, and people would be paying to be hooked up to that cable.
Where it gets weird is that the line between broadcast news/journalism and the online equivalent is VERY blurred, and that’s why we get this sort of confusion about it.
With broadcast regulation, it’s been more a matter of - Regulations issued > Broadcasters find a way around regulations or ignore them > Lax enforcement of regulations by the FCC > FCC eventually decides the rules are antiquated so they’re abolished (i.e. the Fairness Doctrine) > Easily anticipated negative consequences.
“Talk radio is running America. We have to do something about that problem.” - Sen. Trent Lott, (R) Mississippi.
In Britain I noted one effort that was a quick one when climate change misinformation was in many right wing outlets. (Still are in the USA but in England bullshit is less easy to get away with)
The Independent Press Standards Organisation has upheld a complaint against this article. IPSO’s adjudication is as follows:
Following an article published on 5 February 2017 in the Mail on Sunday, headlined ‘EXPOSED How world leaders were duped over global warming’, Bob Ward complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation that the newspaper had breached Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice. IPSO upheld the complaint and has required the Mail on Sunday to publish this decision as a remedy to the breach.
The article reported on claims made by Dr John Bates, a climate scientist formerly employed at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), about a paper published in the journal Science that suggested that there had been no ‘pause’ in global warming in the 2000s. Dr Bates had published a blog criticising the way the data used for the paper had been analysed and archived. The article detailed at length the complainant’s concerns with the data; it then characterised them as demonstrating ‘irrefutable evidence’ that the paper had been based upon ‘misleading, unverified data’.
The article was illustrated with a graph. It plotted a red line, described as ‘the ‘adjusted’ and unreliable sea data cited in the flawed ‘Pausebuster’ paper’, and a blue line, described as ‘the UK Met Office’s independently verified record’, which it said ‘showed lower monthly readings and a shallower recent warming trend’. A note at the base of the graph stated that ‘0 represents 14°C’.
The complainant said that the significance of Dr Bates’ concerns about the archiving procedures had been misrepresented in the article, and the newspaper had taken no steps to establish the veracity of Dr Bates’ claims. World leaders had not been ‘duped’, as the headline said, and there was no ‘irrefutable evidence’ that the paper was based on ‘misleading, unverified data’, as the article had claimed.
The Daily Mail had to add that and more to their internet article. It is more detailed than the simple disclaimer added by Tweeter on misleading posts.
Nice acronym, so yeah, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
This seems like a fairly strong limitation of internet and cable as
There isn’t infinite available space in the ground or above the streets for that matter to run cable connections. Is this why in most areas cable access is a virtual monopoly, licensed by the local government? I’d sure like to see that system change.
Well, at least here in CA, you almost always have two cable choices.
Each cable company doesnt run it’s own cable all the time. Since they are in some ways public utilities, they need a permit to dig up the streets and lay cable so they share.
But by practically infinite what is meant is that one cable can carry thousands of channels. You could easily have a Sov Cit Channel and a Anarchist channel and a Curling channel and a Navajo language channel. You could have a hard core porn channel, but that gets problematic. Lots of soft core porn tho.
But that cable itself can carry a couple orders of magnitude more information than the airwaves. It’s not really infinite, but it may as well be.
Now that broadcast has gone digital, it’s got a bit more throughput to play with, but you truly can fit thousands of channels down that cable, and really at most a few dozen over open RF.
So would the New York Times fall under this category for its ‘1619’ project, which was propaganda littered with historical errors? The New York Times was the home of Walter Duranty, who won a pulitzer for his ‘reporting’ on the Soviet Union, including his denialism of the mass famine in the Ukraine.
How about MSNBC? It is at least as biased as Fox.
The truth is, there is no such thing as ‘unbiased news’. Pretending there is just means it’s easier to spread propaganda as news. The solution to that is a completely free press and the existence of partisan news sites, which allows criticism from both sides and helps keep everyone honest.
Anyone who wants to restrict ‘bad’ political speech should also remember that another Trump could win the Presidency, and the definition of ‘bad’ may change, and not to your liking. You really want to give the guy who calls any journalism that says anything bad aboht him ‘fake news’ the legal power to restrict it?
Freedom of speech is essential to a free society. And history is replete with heterodox views that turned out to be correct but which were suppressed at the time.
