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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
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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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.
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.
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