Mark Steyn outlines the chilling fact that government even writes about the press, which it has no business doing under any circumstances, regulations or no. This is fascism is big bold letters.
From TFA:
The litigious Fake Nobel Laureate Michael E Mann will be heartened to discover that "the environment" has been identified as a Critical Information Need. So the government monitor in your local newsroom will be tracking how the station covers "the environment", what resources it devotes, the prominence it gives to stories, etc. But what if you're a news editor and you happen to disagree that "the environment" is one of the eight most Critical Information Needs. What if you happen to think that "runaway public debt" or "the vulnerability of US diplomatic facilities in Libya" is a more Critical Information Need than "the environment"? What government bureaucrat do you go to to see about getting the federally-mandated Critical Information Needs changed? Or does it require a constitutional amendment?
The state has no business determining which news stories have priorities over others, and certainly no business sending monitors into newsrooms to ensure compliance - because the essence of a functioning press is not what the state decrees the citizen has a "critical need" to know but what it doesn't think he needs to know. Why should "Social Solutions International" get to determine "the critical information needs of the American public"? And why should the government get to enforce them? |