Journalists Turn on Free Expression

[Dashinka 25,862]

Interesting opinion piece by David Harsayni.  It makes a lot of great points regarding the state of journalism today.  Considering all the stories we are hearing about press room activities when a dissenting political view is allowed to be published, it is scary to see the direction the MSM is heading.  Thankfully we have a great many sources as compared to the time that President Obama has opined he misses greatly.

 

Journalists Turn on Free Expression

 

For one thing, I wish I could believe they cared. For four years, journalists acted as if Donald Trump was an existential threat to free expression because he berated and insulted reporters. Trump’s tone was certainly unpresidential, but it needs to be said that he did absolutely nothing to hinder anyone from criticizing him or reporting about him. Contra the self-canonized Jim Acosta, it was not a particularly dangerous time to tell the truth. Indeed, reporters were not only free to accuse the president of being a fascist, they could concoct entire fake scandals surrounding the Russians, and Trump was powerless to stop them.

 

(You might remember the panic over the Cambridge Analytica–Facebook whistleblower scandal. This was one of the stories that convinced Democrats that social-media giants were attacking our democratic institutions. At the time, Bloomberg breathlessly noted that “revelations of the apparent skulduggery that helped Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election keep sending shock waves across the political landscape.” After a three-year investigation, the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office uncovered no skullduggery from Facebook. Chances are, you didn’t hear about that.)

 

In any event, if journalists thought free expression was a “sacred principle,” they would also likely have been up in arms about the Obama administration spying on dozens of Associated Press reporters and using the Espionage Act to file criminal charges against then-Fox News reporter James Rosen. For the most part, they were not.

 

They would also be up in arms about Joe Biden’s appointment of Rick Stengel, a former editor of Time magazine, who takes to the pages of our most prestigious newspapers to advocate that the government ban offensive speech. They would be upset about Biden’s appointment of California attorney general Xavier Becerra, who brought 15 felony charges against a pro-life activist named David Daleiden for reporting on Planned Parenthood’s ethical abuses, using the same methods and functioning under the same standards journalists have employed for decades. There will be no anger, because abortion is “sacred” in a way that free expression is no longer.

 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/journalists-turn-on-free-expression/

[Burnt Reynolds 5,058]

The dangers of political expression or just every day life are all too real for those who support Trump, work for Trump, etc. The fact that these unhinged segments of the population are trying so hard to invert and upend as many societal norms as possible in such rapid fashion is precisely the reason not to give them their way. They're catching people off guard now and attaining short term headway but in the long term they lose. People ultimately become fed up of their you-know-what and we're starting to see signs of that already. At some point their behavior causes the opposition that peacefully follows rules in good faith (only to get destroyed in this way by people that don't care about those rules and norms) to flat out stop listening, and it's gonna suck for them when it happens. 

Edited December 8, 2020 by Burnt Reynolds

[TBoneTX 47,509]

Reading a National Review article via a link from Real Clear Politics!!!  Reported!!!!!