Last week, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission threatened to rescind the broadcast licenses of media entities that do not relate events in Iran or Ukraine as the Trump administration would like them to be related. He also attacked The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times for the same reasons. This followed by one day a verbal attack on CNN by the Secretary of Defense who made known his bitter unhappiness with CNN’s coverage of the Iran war.
Yet, CNN is not regulated by the FCC, which only regulates broadcast media — not cable or streaming; and newspapers, thanks be to God, are totally unregulated.
So, what’s going on here?
What’s going on is chilling. Chilling is government behavior toward speech that is intended to give the speaker pause or fear such that the speaker has second thoughts about speaking. Chilling is prohibited by the First Amendment and has been repudiated by the Supreme Court.
Here is the backstory.
The freedoms of speech and of the press are expressly protected by the First Amendment and have enjoyed wide reinforcement by the courts since the mid-1960s. The original Constitution lacked an express protection for public speech and for the printed word. Yet, the …read more
Source:: Ron Paul Institute
