I’d say that, at present, that’s only one Supreme court appointment away from no longer mattering.

And that’s how it should be! Short of plagiarism, or trading sex for grades, any whack job can be a professor. It’s part of what makes this a great country.

So, exactly what is the difference between censorship, and libel law, for all you conservative smarty-pantses out there?

Over at the James Randi Educational Foundation forum, they have a name for this: “JAQing off”. It’s the attempt by someone to absolve themselves of responsibility for some nutty/offensive/absurd idea by pretending they are not advocating said idea (though everyone knows they are), just “asking questions” or “floating the idea”. 9-11 conspiracy loons deploy this tactic all the time.

And as other have pointed out, you can put your fascist fever-dream fantasy to rest. Fox News cannot have it’s broadcast license revoked because it doesn’t have one.

The eighth edition of the Intellectual Freedom Manual.
http://ala.org/ala/newspresscenter/news/pr.cfm?id=4528

Understand, I’m not actually saying it’d be a good idea to remove tenure for this kind of political commentary. Oh, no, please don’t think that. I’m just asking questions.

So the vast leftwing conspiracy merely needs to change the focus of its efforts.

Cite?

Well, yeah, every day at the water cooler, I suggest that Al Franken should be thrown through a plate glass window, (Preferably non-safety, and an upper floor.) and remark that I’d laugh maniacally if I ever got the chance to watch Obama dying of a heart attack, instead of calling 911 and then doing CPR.[/sarcasm]

Look, Journolist was an ideologically exclusive discussion list for left wing journalists. And it shows, boy does it ever show. This is the kind of crap you DON’T typically talk about unless you know you’re among people who essentially agree with you about just about everything. It’s the sort of stuff that leftists think is edgy and funny, and maybe wistfully think, “If only we could.”. Which is to say that for people who are even centrists, it’s way, way over the line. And it betrays how you really think. (As if we hadn’t already figured that out.) It says so much about Journolist that the participants felt comfortable saying these sorts of things, even if they didn’t entirely mean them.

If you had a listserver for the Klan, you might find remarks about setting up death camps, and repealing the 14th and 15th amendments, and people would still be outraged at them if they leaked, and not be particularly impressed by complaints that leaking the conversation was a betrayal of faith.

And I’ve got a little warning about this sort of thing. You’re all familiar with the “Overton window”, about how bringing up really outrageous things in public can shift the range of ideas that are acceptable to talk about. Well, guess what: Your heart, your soul, has an “Overton Window”, too. When you joke about murder, and censorship, (And particularly if you don’t get immediately slapped down.) you shift that window.

Journolist was a mechanism for shifting a lot of journalists’ windows in a nasty direction. A mechanism for amplifying already considerable biases, and turning partisans into partisan hacks. It was not a good thing, even, or especially, for the participants.

“reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
stephen colbert

there’s really nothing else to say.”

I’ll defend this. Of course, we have to define liberal and conservative better. The modern liberal is concerned with undoing structural inequalities, and applying reason and empiricism to moral questions. He believes in a mixed economy. The modern conservative either believes that such structural inequalities don’t exist or that government can or should not seek to remedy them. He tends to believe that there are divine moral truths that no amount of reason can penetrate, and in fact the process of inquiry itself is a form of blasphemy.

These are largely empirical questions. The evidence is overwhelmingly on the side of at least moderate liberalism. To the extent that we are reasonable people, we are all liberals now, to a degree. Journalism and academia are generally liberal enterprises. Classical conservatism is now merely a flavor of liberalism, while modern conservatism is less concerned with reality than sloganeering and political sophistry.

Seriously, have none of them ever thrown out an extreme and/or controversial idea to be discussed, even if you didn’t wholly agree with it? I have, under different names on different boards.

personally i find the right-wing bias of cnn to be offensive because they pretend to objectivity. npr isn’t much better but at least they’re less likely to flog lohanesque stories than cnn. i much prefer “democracy now” with amy goodman as a source of news when i’m looking for an actual left-wing slant just as i watch “fox news” when i’m looking for a right-wing slant on events.

I appreciate Zasloff’s intent, which was simply to ask whether we ought to stop publicly subsidizing people who lie, with *our* spectrum. (Note: I never watch Fox, don’t know if they lie or not.)(Yes, I know that means I’m not getting enough conservative views. Find me one who isn’t insanely annoying — Max Boot, Jonah What’sisname at LAT, …- and I promise to watch/read. Haven’t found anyone since Herbert Stein who didn’t make me want to hurl, but, I admit I don’t look that hard.) If it’s a cable channel, then it’s a moot point in the particular instance. Plus, maybe fines for particular lies is a better way to go. They can avoid with a retraction. What would be so horrible about that? It would only get rid of the provably false stuff anyhow. The gasbags would be safe.

BUT, the issue of lying liars — of any stripe — is worth considering. Do you all really think that our media functions effectively in smoking them out? Do you seriously think our media environment is healthy? (Are you high at this very moment???) And if not, I assume then that you have no problem with this idea that all political ads will have to name their sponsors? What could you possibly be afraid of?

Let’s not forget that Zasloff’s hardly wrong to execrate “Fox News”. “Fox News” is a transparently partisan propaganda organization, in a manner that’s completely unapproached by any other similarly large organization in the US. Can Dave Schutz sincerely think that NPR is remotely as biased as Fox News? That the news coverage of the New York Times or the Washington Post is particularly slanted? Heck, even the op-ed pages of the New York Times are hardly dominated by liberal firebrands, while there’s hardly a liberal in the country who doesn’t hate the neocon- and villager-dominated Washington Post op-ed pages. Even MSNBC, the only major media organization in the US to actively cater to liberal bias (excluding Pacifica for sake of argument), does so only in its prime-time commentary shows, and has its morning show dominated by a Republican. Meanwhile, the management of Fox News literally sends out memos to all departments indicating what issues are to be pushed and how they are to be framed, and we see obscure issues and personalities covered wall-to-wall on Fox News on spurious grounds for political advantage (see for example, the nonsense about the New Black Panther Party, which at least according to what I read spent a week as the obsession of Fox News despite the furore being entirely unfounded). It’s 6 years old, of course, but Robert Greenwald’s documentary Outfoxed is free online, and if Fox News (now with Glenn Beck!) has gotten any more “fair and balanced” in those six years it’d be news to me.

By the way, I’m not completely sure Fox News is a cable-only network: Fox’s local stations run “Fox News Sunday” opposite “Meet The Press” and “This Week”. And I’m not sure whether the local affilates’ news shows use nationally syndicated news content provided by the Fox News cable channel. There is a public-service requirement for the broadcast licenses, and despite what Brett says they are quite limited and quite hot commodities, especially so long as analog broadcasting persisted. This public-service requirement has in the past been interpreted to permit a requirement for childrens’ educational programming and political balance; both of these requirements have disappeared in law or in practice, but I don’t think either was ruled unconstitutional.

“reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
stephen colbert

there’s really nothing else to say.

As you can imagine, it’s been sort of a crazy day. Couple of things: I actually don’t claim any particular expertise about FCC and First Amendment issues, which is why I framed the question AS A QUESTION — could this be done? As Gabriel mentions, Red Lion at least makes a plausible although hardly slam dunk argument that it could. Maybe Red Lion was right; maybe it was wrong. But I don’t think that a unanimous Supreme Court was full of Nazis and fascists and what have you.

Recall the famous/infamous fairness doctrine, which was at issue in Red Lion: it may have been good or bad, but it doesn’t raise the specter of jackboots.

Richard Campbell — are you sure you’re right about the FCC and cable? After all, the famous case of Turner Broadcasting v. FCC was about cable regulation. I’m not sure myself, but it’s not quite as clear as that, I don’t think. I’d be interested to hear your views.

Brett — you may be right about the spectrum issue. I don’t know. Again, that’s why I raised a question. And it’s not a Fox News question, e.g. “is Obama a socialist/Nazi?” It was a question NOT raised in public for precisely the reason that I didn’t know. And still don’t.

i was referring to the practice of objectivity rather than an actual accomplishment of it. there’s a pretty large academic literature on this, most notably this article by Tuchman. CNN and NPR for the most part do follow the practice of objectivity laid out in the literature on the issue. whether they actually accomplish it is of course debatable, but my feeling is that the practice of objectivity is coupled (albeit loosely) to the achievement of the same. that is, practices like placing potentially contentious statements within direct quotes from named sources is likely to result in media content that is actually more impartial than blatantly abandoning such practice.

as for the idea that such a conclusion is “risible,” i can only refer you to work by Gentzkow and Shapiro (and also here) that people tend to trust media when it panders to their prejudices and thus partisans tend to distrust centrist media.

fwiw, i enjoyed your satire of “fairness” as applied to academia

“…Scherer, who had seemed to express support for increased regulation of Fox, suddenly appeared to have qualms: “Do you really want the political parties/white house picking which media operations are news operations and which are a less respectable hybrid of news and political advocacy?”
“I think that they are doing that anyway; they leak to whom they want to for political purposes,” he wrote. “If this means that some White House reporters don’t get a press pass for the press secretary’s daily briefing and that this means that they actually have to, you know, do some reporting and analysis instead of repeating press releases, then I’ll take that risk.”

You didn’t address Scherer’s concern. Do you really think there is a legitimate analogy between the WH selectively leaking information and determining who gets to disseminate information to the public via the airwaves and what information is disseminated? Even if the WH does leak information selectively, this only means that one organization gets it before the others. All of them are eventually able to report on it with their own interpretation and ineluctable spin. What you are suggesting, and what Scherer obviously found disturbing, is that the government limit speech based upon political ideology.

Also, if we were to apply your reasoning to academia, I suppose you’d find no problem with the proposition that, due to the very limited number of tenured positions, universities should set expiration dates for tenure and be able to “simply yank” tenure from certain individuals, because they are mere arms of the Democratic Party, such as you. (Do you really think the folks in the various “social sciences” are any less biased than FOX? Those departments where everyone regurgitates Gramsci and Adorno as if they speak the infallible truth? Should these people be monitored and FORCED also to teach Leo Strauss and Novick or else risk losing tenure? Or is it up to the student, just as it is up to the news consumer, to actively challenge what’s promulgated? You and Cass Sunstein seem to have very authoritarian and paternalistic notions regarding these matters). This would have the same “chilling effect” on academic freedom that it would on journalism. It would not serve as a mere check; it would likely cause individuals to remain silent in fear of having their license revoked for being suspected of having “inappropriate ideas.”

It seems you, in the above response, have backed off the position which you proffered on Journolist- the position which disturbed Scherer- and now admit that ideology-based licensing decisions would be dangerous (But this seems, based on the limited context, to be precisely what you’re suggesting on Journolist). Do you really believe this now- or have you moderated your position now that it’s out in the public?

Re: Gabriel, I’d like to know what you mean by “good faith effort” at objectivity. You list CNN and NPR as examples? What’s the criterion you used to determine “good faith effort”? Just because CNN and NPR don’t have opinion journalists doesn’t mean they’re not slanted and make a “good faith effort” at objectivity. At least with organizations like FOX and MSNBC you know to be on your toes and not to imbibe uncritically. I can’t imagine someone honestly thinking that CNN and NPR make a good faith effort to be objective- that actually seems risible.