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2004 Jefferson Muzzle Awards
un1xl0ser writes "The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression has released the muzzle awards for people who forgot that "free speech can not be limited without being lost". Check out the 2004 "winners". Famous winners include The U.S. Department of Defense and CBS."
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:V6FSfxtunyYJ: www.tjcenter.org/muzzles.html+&hl=en&ie=UT F-8
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
You can still freely read AC postings, nobody's exercising "censorship" just because you can't read them at +2. One of the prices of free speech is that a large quantity of "low-quality" speech may sometimes have to be waded through. I.e. The Internet :-)
Freedom: "I won't!"
THE 2004 JEFFERSON MUZZLES GO TO ...
(individual accounts of the winners follows)
Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum
The U.S. Department of Defense
The United States Secret Service
The Albemarle County (VA) School Board
Baseball Hall of Fame President Dale Petroskey
CBS Television
The University of New Orleans Administration
The Administration of Dearborn High School (Michigan)
The South Carolina House of Representatives
The Parks and Recreation Division of Broward County (Florida)
Jeff Webster of Soldotna, Alaska, and the Unnamed Arsonist of Harrisonburg, Virginia
The Arizona State License Commission
The Pilot Point (Texas) Police Department
I think that the main reason this was funny is the school board banning the NRA shirt because of the gun silloutes it has... but failing to recognize that this would ban their school mascott... a patriot weilding a musket. I'm just glad that someone pointed it out to them. - un1xl0ser
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If he hasn't already, John Ashcroft deserves an honorary trophy all for himself.
He has one
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
Yes, private companies can do all the "muzzling" that they want. Which is why they do it. No laws are being broken.
That doesn't mean we have to like it, which is what this is all about.
His issue is that he never heard anything about being yanked off the air for indecency until he started criticizing Dubya. Clear Channel is (apparently) the largest broadcasting donator to Dubya's campaign, and he feels that pressure was probably put on them to yank him off the air.
It's all conjecture, I suppose, and I haven't read a whole lot about it other than what's on the news wires, so I'm hardly an expert.
My father-in-law is an executive at a bank and he has been telling me how they are now required to forward information about any transaction which might look a bit funny with information about the person doing the transaction to the FBI. The banks are so afraid of not sending enough information or being blamed for supporting terrorists that they are sending EVERYTHING - including personal information about their customers, and all of the people that the customers do business with.
Most loans, deposits, and withdrawals are being forwarded to the authorities with information attached on who, where, and why these transactions have occoured.
The problem that the banks are having is with the new citizens. Apparently, people born in the United States have no problem giving up personal information to banks in order to conduct transactions. It is the people that are now citizens but came over from oppresive regimes that are having trouble handing over personal information about them and their families, friends, associates.
This is also affecting the economy, as banks are afraid to loan money without knowing exactly where the money is going to be spent. If a bank has any doubts about where even a few dollars will go they will deny the loan and forward the person's name to the authorities.
See, I disagree. Neither Sarandon nor Robbins intended to make the ceremony a political forum. Petroskey didn't ask them not to. He simply decided, unilaterally, that people who thought the way Sarandon and Robbins did shouldn't be allowed to speak in public.
In so doing, Petroskey politicized the Baseball HOF much more strongly than Robbins or Sarandon could have.
He made no attempts to control the content, like by asking Robbins and Sarandon to keep their speech non-political and centered on baseball and the movie being celebrated. His intention was to *punish* Robbins and Sarandon for saying what they believed and he didn't like. That, my friend, is the stifling of free speech. Let us not forget that Dale Petroskey served under President Ronald Reagan as press secretary. While he may not currently be a government official, it's clear that his actions were politically motivated and intended to act as political protection for the sitting President.
It IS the stifling of free speech, both directly and by intimidation. Moreover, it is wrong. Morally and legally.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
Perhapse Scalia should be added to the list.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
a privately owned broadcast network is of course free to accept or reject submitted material as it wishes. Indeed, any governmental attempt to commandeer airtime for a particular message would almost certainly abridge a broadcaster's First Amendment freedoms. Yet the very power and authority that the major television networks possess impose a certain responsibility to exercise such power conscientiously and in the public interest. It is just that expectation which CBS seems, once again, to have disregarded.
Howard's audience is not dropping, and that has nothing to do with why he is being taken off the air. You should go read some of the articles linked at his site
" Howard Stern was dropped from a handful of stations (he's on hundreds) in markets that he was doing poorly in."
This is so far from incorrect that its not funny:
1) Howard is on in "dozens" of markets because unlike Laura or Rush, he gets paid to be on the station instead of taking cut of the commercial time
2) He was indeed yanked (particularly in Florida) on stations that he was highly rated, and in one or two cases rated number one.
3) You are clearly a Clear Channel troll. I hope clear channel dies and all the people who work for it get cancer. Including you.
Clear Channel dropped him in response to government fines. Said fines came in response to behavior by Stern that the FCC had on previous occasions deemed non-obscene. The new decisions followed Stern's criticisms of government policy in an election year.
Certainly not an air tight case, I'll grant you. But it does have a bad smell to it.
Apparently the right to free speech also protects the right to knowingly tell a lie even where public health is involved.
Some reporters discovered that drugs that Monsanto sold to dairy farmers were getting into milk. There was evidence that this was a public health hazard. Fox killed the story at Monsanto's request (threat actually). A Florida appeals court agreed that telling lies is not illegal and threw out the reporters' case.
"Although the Florida jurors concluded she was pressured by FOX lawyers and managers to broadcast what the jury agreed was "a false, distorted or slanted story" and was fired for threatening to blow the whistle, that decision was reversed on a legal technicality when the higher court agreed with FOX that it is technically not against any law, rule or regulation"
http://www.populist.com/03.09.krebs.html
Well, the two corporations are the Baseball Hall of Fame and CBS. In the former case, they were punishing Tim Robbins for an act of political speech totally unrelated to anything having to do with baseball or Robbins' acting career. This doesn't violate the 1st Amendment, it just goes totally against the spirit of it. (Yes, I know that people should be held accountable for their words, and most of the time I wish Robbins would shut the hell up.) The HOF president said that Robbins' criticisms of Bush "helps undermine the U.S. position, which ultimately could put our troops in even more danger." It's not his call. But, sure, he's still within his rights.
As for CBS, they're also on the list for bowing to pressure from politicians, and for suppressing a political ad. Yanking the Reagan movie was a particulary craven action on their part. Since they're entrusted with a fat slab of the public spectrum, our expectations for them are different than if, say, A&E decides to censor something.
Yeah, you're right, it's not like Scalia apologized for the incident or anything. He probably didn't even know it happened until well after the fact (considering he was speaking at the time).
The US Marshal, on the other hand, may be up for the award...
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
"ClearChannel has an exclusive, government-granted monopoly over a large swath of the FM broadcast spectrum through their numerous, sweeping FCC licenses"
If you look at the numbers, you will see that Clear Channel has no monopoly anywhere. Overall, they control a mere 8% of radio stations. In certain large markets where they have many stations, they control as much as 25%. Words do mean things. You do not have a monopoly if you control a mere 25% of something.
"Someone who can't get their work published in the NYT can simply print their own newspaper and distribute it. Not so with radio."
So, someone shut out of CC's 1,200 stations is perfectly free to go to the other 18,000 or so radio stations.
"If you have petitioned the government to allow you to be the nearly the only provider of 'x', then you must serve the public interest in a responsible manner."
I agree. Who better to determine this than the listening public? Check the ratings; that is the best determination of whether or not a station serves the public.