The US has for many years seen its First Amendment "used" as the protection [shield?] to basically do, say and publish as one wants - with few limitations.
Increasingly the Rush Limbaughs [on radio], Bill O'Reilly [on Fox News - a euphemism is ever there was one!] and a variety of others of the same toxic ilk, have gone further and further out on a limb spewing a variety of hatreds and prejudices.
The recent shooting of a doctor involved in abortions and in the last days a guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington has, not for the first time, highlighted the question of how far these dis-assemblers of truth and hate-mongers ought to be allowed to go. It's a slippery slope allowing people with any sort of profile in the media the totally unfettered ability to vent their spleen on whatever topic takes their fancy or spew forth in exaggerated and hateful language.
It's a topic that Frank Rich takes up in his weekly op-ed column "The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers" in The NY Times:
"When a Fox News anchor, reacting to his own network’s surging e-mail traffic, warns urgently on-camera of a rise in hate-filled, “amped up” Americans who are “taking the extra step and getting the gun out,” maybe we should listen. He has better sources in that underground than most.
The anchor was Shepard Smith, speaking after Wednesday’s mayhem at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Unlike the bloviators at his network and elsewhere on cable, Smith is famous for his highly caffeinated news-reading, not any political agenda. But very occasionally — notably during Hurricane Katrina — he hits the Howard Beale mad-as-hell wall. Joining those at Fox who routinely disregard the network’s “We report, you decide” mantra, he both reported and decided, loudly.
What he reported was this: his e-mail from viewers had “become more and more frightening” in recent months, dating back to the election season. From Wednesday alone, he “could read a hundred” messages spewing “hate that’s not based in fact,” much of it about Barack Obama and some of it sharing the museum gunman’s canard that the president was not a naturally born citizen. These are Americans “out there in a scary place,” Smith said.
Then he brought up another recent gunman: “If you’re one who believes that abortion is murder, at what point do you go out and kill someone who’s performing abortions?” An answer, he said, was provided by Dr. George Tiller’s killer. He went on: “If you are one who believes these sorts of things about the president of the United States ...” He left the rest of that chilling sentence unsaid."
Increasingly the Rush Limbaughs [on radio], Bill O'Reilly [on Fox News - a euphemism is ever there was one!] and a variety of others of the same toxic ilk, have gone further and further out on a limb spewing a variety of hatreds and prejudices.
The recent shooting of a doctor involved in abortions and in the last days a guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington has, not for the first time, highlighted the question of how far these dis-assemblers of truth and hate-mongers ought to be allowed to go. It's a slippery slope allowing people with any sort of profile in the media the totally unfettered ability to vent their spleen on whatever topic takes their fancy or spew forth in exaggerated and hateful language.
It's a topic that Frank Rich takes up in his weekly op-ed column "The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers" in The NY Times:
"When a Fox News anchor, reacting to his own network’s surging e-mail traffic, warns urgently on-camera of a rise in hate-filled, “amped up” Americans who are “taking the extra step and getting the gun out,” maybe we should listen. He has better sources in that underground than most.
The anchor was Shepard Smith, speaking after Wednesday’s mayhem at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Unlike the bloviators at his network and elsewhere on cable, Smith is famous for his highly caffeinated news-reading, not any political agenda. But very occasionally — notably during Hurricane Katrina — he hits the Howard Beale mad-as-hell wall. Joining those at Fox who routinely disregard the network’s “We report, you decide” mantra, he both reported and decided, loudly.
What he reported was this: his e-mail from viewers had “become more and more frightening” in recent months, dating back to the election season. From Wednesday alone, he “could read a hundred” messages spewing “hate that’s not based in fact,” much of it about Barack Obama and some of it sharing the museum gunman’s canard that the president was not a naturally born citizen. These are Americans “out there in a scary place,” Smith said.
Then he brought up another recent gunman: “If you’re one who believes that abortion is murder, at what point do you go out and kill someone who’s performing abortions?” An answer, he said, was provided by Dr. George Tiller’s killer. He went on: “If you are one who believes these sorts of things about the president of the United States ...” He left the rest of that chilling sentence unsaid."
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