President says broadcasters should lose licenses for criticizing him
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Edit: for those claiming this isn't a free speech issue the President is using the FCC to go after people he doesn't like. He must be a special snowflake.
Victimhood distorts reality and leads to outsized reprisals.
Can't you say the same about the Jimmy Kimmel situation? He's not in jail, he's free to speak, his employer just didn't want to back him up on it.
All of the arguments used to excuse cancel culture ("right to speech not to a platform", "it's a company censoring you, not the government", "freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences") are now being leveraged by the right. Why did anyone think it would go any other way? Was the assumption that the left would own the cultural zeitgeist forever? This whole approach to politics was folly.
The president does not get to dictate broadcasting licenses on the basis of whether or not they criticize him but ABC is not required to platform Kimmel.
(I think it’s a bad move to deplatform people and bad for democracy but it’s been misconstrued into an issue of constitutional guarantees and it is not one.)
Isn’t that the federal govt “abridging the freedom of the press” ?
Regardless of that, it certainly seems like some kind of corruption.
"this is what was threatened by the FCC"
Yes, that was clearly the assumption. It's hard to blame them; that had been the case for 50+ years, and the early 2020s suggested that they had the system licked and would be fully in charge until their internal contradictions brought them down.
Don’t you remember post 9/11 war mongering? Jingoistic country songs?
Was the Supreme Court not almost fully captured in the early 2020s?
Was the majority of news media on television and radio not extremely right leaning?
Those arguments are correct though. Free speech doesn't guarantee a platform. Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences. The First Amendment does only apply to the government. None of this was controversial until the right decided shitposting their hot takes on black people and the Holocaust was a fundamental human right.
And they're being leveraged by the same right wing that wanted the government to seize control of social media platforms and force them to allow right-wing content and make moderation illegal. And Jimmy Kimmel's firing was due to pressure by the chair of the FCC, which isn't even the context in which those arguments were made and is an obvious violation of the First Amendment
But zing, I guess..
This was the sales pitch, but it wasn't reality. People were being banned for much less severe speech than this kind of stuff and the window was slowly creeping towards less and less severe disagreements with the dominant narrative. I think bans for COVID stuff were particularly galling for many people[1].
There's a fair argument that the COVID situation was dire and required drastic action, but this can't be papered over in retrospect by saying that only holocaust deniers and racists were being banned.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/2/twitter-to-permanent...
They said they wanted more promotion of conservative viewpoints.
Kind of a subtle, but important distinction there.
Neither liberals, nor conservatives support free speech.
"In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town; and under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree."
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I would say, to see the USA moving into Nazism, in realtime, in my lifetime, is a pretty amazing intellectual endeavor to dissect.
But this is a reasonable approximation to where things stood in, say, 1937. Granted, they've not gone after neighbouring countries (yet?) but they've had their vom Raths, Horst Wessel's, ... And we'll see if the Reichstag burns over the next year. If they screw up the mid-term elections or talk about an enabling act or let trump run a 3rd term, will that be good enough for ya?
And they talk about racial purity and limit women's roles and future. I'm sure there's a lebensraum in there somewhere. If you think using the term "Nazi" Godwin's the discussion, ok, just use Fascist. You have more countries to compare to with that term: Italy, Spain, Portugal, ...
now we have plastic hoods and a tank of Nitrogen.
In this clip [0] of "Fox and Friends", the first host (Lawrence Jones) says that homeless people be forced to accept "the programs" from the government, or else be locked up in prison... and then Brian Kilmeade ramps it up with "just kill 'em", using "involuntary lethal injection."
Also, why gas chambers specifically? The means don't matter as much as the objectives.
The uncharitable assertion is that you want people to believe that the label is incorrect... but you're afraid or incapable of making the argument, so you are maliciously sowing doubt.
Neither are a particularly good look.
The Fourth Reich
-The government attempting to control speech by removing broadcast licenses from networks that don’t comply. Joseph Goebbels blacklisted actors that were not fully onboard with the Nazi regime [0]
Those are just the examples I can think of from the past week. All of the anti-science, anti-medicine, and anti-intellectualism over the past 6 months as well.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1939/02/04/archives/goebbels-ends-ca...
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/fbi-readies-new-war-on-tra...
Not counting all of the impact on health, medicine, science, ... One can keep flagging away, but if you're going to watch the cash flow elsewhere and the jobs remain open, I would think some concern is merited. And if, somehow, people working in this area realize what their work has helped produced...
800 comments and nowhere to be seen in the first 15 pages... :-)
VCs in the late 1970s (the real age of "hackers") were, in the words of John Doerr, considered "filthy real estate salesmen." This was the opinion at the time of Andy Grove, who was CEO of intel during its rise.
The big companies and VCs are cowering to protect their investments.