Boston Globe Editor Calls for Coordinated MSM Attack on President Trump

Marjorie Pritchard, Globe Newspaper Editor​

Make sure you read the citizen-comments at the bottom of the article!

Full article:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/newspaper-calls-war-words-against-193505874.html

 

So what do they call what have they been doing since the day he was elected???

What more could they possibly do to indicate their HATRED for the man?

No Boston Globe, proclaiming dislike and distrust of the opinion media is NOT an attack on the First Amendment. Nobody has silenced the media, have they? (Nobody could shut up that insane screeching, like fingernails on a chalkboard.) The First Amendment doesn't make the media immune from criticism.

The real attacks on the First Amendment are the left trying to silence Americans exercising freedom of speech and assembly (including election campaign events) to express political opinion that the left dislikes. Freedom of the press is no more Constitutionally sacrosanct than freedom of speech and freedom to peacefully assemble.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/06/03/ugly-bloody-scenes-in-san-jose-as-protesters-attack-trump-supporters-outside-rally/?utm_term=.aee29c5cf17d

Given the growing distrust and hostility for the opinion media out there, you would think that a few of them would look in the mirror and ask themselves why people feel that way.

Here's about the only thing that I've seem in which a journalist tried to do that, published in November 2016 a few days after the election.

"It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump's victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on...

Had Hillary Clinton won, there'd be a winking "we did it" feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.

So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out was rather limited... Trump knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us and have for some time.

And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists..."[/QUOTE]

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-the-unbearable-smugness-of-the-press-presidential-election-2016/

 

Sure. Real exercise of First Amendment is to help the President appease bigots and sell off the Western World to Putin. Pointing it out is hatred and bigotry.

Thank you for this lesson on double standards as bedrock of Trumpism-Putinism ideology.

 

Amusing. By all means, read the comments; help the friendly Russian hired trolls meet their daily quotas.
Seriously, go help them. They are notoriously underpaid; the "11 roubles a comment" meme actually overestimates what "Putin's chef" and war criminal Evgenij Prigozhin pays poor little cubicle rats in his sweatshop in St. Petersbourgh, Russia.

 

Stanislav, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protected free speech in the town square (aka public domain) when it was ratified in 1791. The internet is the new public domain in the 21st Century. However, media platforms are controlled by a political monopoly which restricts speech in the new public domain i.e. the banning of InfoWars.com is the most obvious example. The monopoly will be disassembled to allow unrestricted political free speech in the new public domain (which did not exist in 1791).

 

Is that one of those QAnon ideas?

 

Sounds like it to me!

 

You know what's funny? Freedom-loving me again calling writing some op eds "attack on President" while advocating Fidel Castro-like takeover of private companies to force them to provide "public domain" - literally, expropriation. By his own definition, the dude came out as a Communist - without even noticing. Exactly like his ilk parrot Putin propaganda all draped in American flag.

There are no smart, honest Trumpists; pick any two.

 

I'm all three.

 

Kizmet, it’s related to Congressional antitrust laws dating back to 1890.

 

Everyone's a hero in their own mind.

Context: I've learned this joke back in the day in Soviet context, and it referred to "smart, honest Party member". Similarity is striking. Of course, seeing how The Party was actually part of the State there were quite a few exceptions to the rule (eg., my grandfather, who had the member card but never any kind of a functionary, even the most petty one. A Soviet scientist decorated WWII veteran is a kind of person they liked to celebrate, if only superficially; no way could he be allowed to remain unPartied). I can see many reluctant Trump supporters can be exceptions too - a political appointee keeping head low to do what she thinks is an important job, or a one-issue devotee (eg., a pro-lifer) ignoring everything else. All these involve ethical or intellectual compromises, just like being a paper Communist was back in the day. I knew and respected several committed Republicans back in Florida; I realise that sadly most of these voted for Trump, and many (hopefully, fewer) will do it again in 2020.

 

...laws applied for political reasons.

You are a Commie. Specifically, a Bolshevik. Embrace it.

 

I have very mixed feelings about that idea.

Ideally, I'd prefer that the government keep away from trying to legislate what is and isn't appropriate content in the media. There's just too much opportunity for Chinese-style abuse. Solving the problem of monopolistic content-collusion by private internet firms by placing them under the supervision of an even more monopolistic government authority places far too heavy a burden on whether we trust our government authorities. (I don't.)

I'm not an attorney, but here's my layman's take on it:

My understanding is that ironically, the one place in US federal law in which "collusion" actually is a crime is in anti-trust law. If the various tech-titans who dominate (and potentially control) the average person's access to information collude on what that information should be, that would seem to me to be a potential violation. If it's an anti-trust violation to collude to fix prices, then it would seem to be an even more egregious violation to collude in hopes of steering (and hence subverting) democracy.

Another avenue might be by lawsuits against media companies for hosting libelous content. Hitherto, media companies were immune from libel lawsuits. The justification for that immunity was that the platforms weren't responsible for the content on their platform. (You couldn't sue the phone company for things said over the phone.) But once a platform starts controlling content, when it is determining what can and can't be said on the platform and who can and can't participate there, their immunity regarding what's said might arguably disappear.

 

Oh great. By all means, monitor content; that'll be different in stated objective but identical in practice to Russia's "anti-extremism" "laws" and Rosmonitoring. You guys are not even subtle.

 

Heirophant, you explained it to a tee. How should it be addressed?

• Break up the monopoly? But then would it become a series of regional monopolies instead of a global or national monopoly?
• If the national monopoly is allowed to remain, then Congress needs to prohibit monopolists from political and religious censorship of contrary views.

He who controls the flow of information controls public perception. It's a sticky web, but monopolistic censorship that has the ability to manipulate (control) public perception (opinion) must be addressed. On the one hand, if the tech giants are not "broken up," then they must be prohibited from political and religious censorship, but the legislative criteria is unprecedented and it's in uncharted territories because the internet didn't exist when the First Amendment was created. There was no such thing as an "internet monopoly" (a global mouthpiece), but in the 1700s, there was only the town square, public sidewalks and the printing press, which took time to print and then distribute to local venues.

Here is the bottom line question: Is the internet the new "public domain" that has become the town square's new technological mouthpiece? If that is the case, then monopolistic censorship cannot be allowed. But what are the parameters? For example, it is illegal to falsely yell "fire" in a crowded theater because the stampede to exit can result in injuries or deaths. Similarly, what restrictions should be allowed in an "internet public domain," without resorting to political or religious censorship? Those questions are developing and the answers will evolve legally. There is not a consensus answer, at the time of this writing.

 

I don't really know. I can just think about it and throw ideas out there.

That's what happened when Bell Telephone was broken up. But today, I don't see breaking up Google's up-to-90% stranglehold on search (in the US anyway, obviously not in China) as resulting in anything like regional internet search monopolies the way breaking up Bell resulted in regional phone companies. It would just mean more search engine choices wherever you are, perhaps engines with different biases regarding the results they bring to your attention. Hopefully all without the government intruding into the content question at all.

Facebook is a different sort of problem. I don't use Facebook, don't have an account there and don't get my news on Facebook. But lots of people apparently do use it as their news portal. So in that case, I'd say that a lot of the blame is on those lazy and undiscriminating users.

I guess that there were newspaper monopolies in some smaller cities, but the barriers to entry into the 18th century newspaper industry weren't high. In fact the period was notable for the variety and profusion of little pamphlets and broadsheets that were published. Just get a printing press and hire couple of employees.

But today, who has the resources to challenge the tech-titans? They have billion-dollar deep-pockets, armies of attorneys and control all of the strategic patents. (To say nothing of being joined at the hip to the "deep state".) The barriers to entry are vastly higher.

Ironically, back in the 1990's everyone imagined that the internet wasn't going to be like that. Everyone could create a webpage or a blog, just as easily as anyone in 1770 could print up a pamphlet. It was supposed to be a brave new age of citizen journalism. I guess that it's still happening, except that the elites are trying desperately to herd the public away from any source of opinion that doesn't suit their purposes.

I'd say 'yes'. Definitely.

I agree. My preferred solution (at this moment, my thinking is a work-in-progress) is to break it up and lower barriers to entry as much as possible.

That's the course that Canada and Europe have taken with their fondness for 'hate-speech' laws. (It's the way the democrats want to go in the US too.) Creating situations in which anyone calling for enforcement of immigration law or anyone criticizing illegal immigration runs the risk of criminal prosecution. Boris Johnson says that "women" in burkas look like letterboxes to him (dehumanized), and is now being investigated by the police for 'hate speech'. Yet antifa operate openly, with freedom and impunity.

That's how it works. The hypocrisy and favoritism in how these things are applied are astounding. That's how it always works. (Criticize any aspect of Islam: hate speech. Atheists criticizing Christianity: free speech.) New rules are proposed, rules that always sound good initially on paper, and they are always interpreted so as to favor the ruling elites and their political allies.

I agree 100% with that.

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/16/us-newspapers-promote-press-freedom-after-trump-attacks-on-media.html