Monday, September 25, 2023

Corrupt Media Worse Than Crooked Senators

Most of them would have found the bribery indictment of a New Jersey senator unsurprising and only mildly interesting.

As Thomas Jefferson succinctly put it, "Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." In Jefferson's era, the press was made up of myriad independent publications that espoused a wide range of editorial viewpoints and competed with one another for readers.

More sinister is the Trusted News Initiative, a global coalition of news organizations, social media and Big Tech firms whose ostensible goal is to tackle harmful disinformation.

During his opening statement to the July 20 meeting of the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. described TNI as a "News censorship cartel." He went on to describe how it actually operates: "Whenever non-mainstream online news publishers report facts or viewpoints deemed by the TNI to be 'misinformation,' TNI members censor, shadow-ban, or deplatform those publishers." Fox News reports that Kennedy's organization, Children's Health Defense, has filed federal lawsuits in Texas as well as Louisiana against various members of TNI alleging that their censorship activities constitute a clear violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

In Associated Press v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled against AP pursuant to an agreement it made with its members precluding them from sharing their stories with nonmembers and that existing members had to exclude new ones.

The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs through the channel of the public papers.

People like Jefferson understood that some of our elected officials would be corrupt. 

https://spectator.org/corrupt-media-worse-than-crooked-senators/

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