Journalist Lemmings Dive Off Cliff While AG Holder Spies, Blusters & Prevaricates - Intellectual Ankle-Grabbers Drowning in Tank for Obama

Kelly O’Donnell * Canada Free Press

Of all of the accidentally hilarious aspects of the implosion of Obama’s War Against the Bill of Rights, none is more informative than his broadside against journalism and Freedom of the Press. What does it say about those who take their very sustenance from the 1^st Amendment Free Speech clause that many want to extinguish other people’s constitutional liberties at every possible opportunity?

In fact, these journalism-lite “professionals” are simply one more example of the failed American intellectual elite whose commitment to leftist doctrines supersedes any interest in unbiased reporting. Will the media’s obsession with supporting the progressive movement at every turn cost them their own livelihood and personal freedoms? This ironic outcome seems more likely with each passing day

I. History of a Free Press: John Peter Zenger Speaking Truth to Power

A brief history of American Freedom of the Press would include the English foundation, being John Milton’s immortal Areopagitica and the original British Parliament Free Speech provision. Milton wrote:

This is true Liberty when free born men
Having to advise the public may speak free,
Which he who can, and will, deserv’s high praise,
Who neither can nor will, may hold his peace;
What can be juster in a State then this?

The Framers of the Constitution understood how important a free press was to keeping a democracy healthy by keeping the People informed. So the First Amendment states:

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances

The Framers were dedicated to Free Press. Note the Appeal to the Inhabitants of Quebec, written by the First Continental Congress in 1774:

The last right we shall mention regards the freedom of the press. The importance of this consists, besides the advancement of truth, science, morality, and arts in general, in its diffusion of liberal sentiments on the administration of Government, its ready communication of thoughts between subjects, and its consequential promotion of union among them, whereby oppressive officers are shamed or intimidated into more honorable and just modes of conducting affairs.

After the Bill of Rights, the pinnacle of America’s defense of Free Press occurred during the early 18th century Zenger trial, where Zenger was tried by New York State for seditious libel. He had written unflattering words about Governor William Cosby, seen as an arbitrary lapdog for the British. Zenger’s attorney asserted that truth was the only necessary defense of libel.

The trial of John Peter Zenger, printer of the New York Weekly Journal, in August, 1735, raises vital questions about liberty that were of special concern both in England and America during the 17^th and 18^th centuries. One question concerns the limits to free speech and to freedom of the press: May citizens rightly and safely criticize government officials if those officials are thought to have abused their powers?

Zenger was thereafter acquitted. This victory helped fuel the newspaper industry in America, making government meddling much harder to sustain. Framer of the Constitution, James Madison, explained how America differed from Britain in the Freedom of the Press:

In the United States the case is altogether different. The People, not the Government, possess the absolute sovereignty. The Legislature, no less than the Executive, is under limitations of power. Encroachments are regarded as possible from the one as well as from the other. Hence, in the United States the great and essential rights of the people are secured against legislative as well as against executive ambition. They are secured, not by laws paramount to prerogative, but by constitutions paramount to laws. This security of the freedom of the press requires that it should be exempt not only from previous restraint by the Executive, as in Great Britain, but from legislative restraint also; and this exemption, to be effectual, must be an exemption not only from the previous inspection of licensers, but from the subsequent penalty of laws.

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