Will the real Slim Shady please shut up

[Bill Stewart]

At 06:03 PM 06/07/2001 +0100, Ken Brown wrote:
>Clue me in here chaps - what's the deal with anyone censoring anything
>at all? You guys are always telling us that your nth amendment
>guarantees freedom of speech unlike us poor benighted eurosheep. If you
>now tell me that freedom of speech doesn't actually apply on commercial
>radio...

It depends.  If you're talking about obscenity on the radio or internet,
or commercial speech like tobacco advertising, then, no, the
First Amendment isn't about that, it's about protecting political speech.
Of course, if you're talking about election campaign finances,
and whether somebody can spend their own money to promote their
political beliefs, that's a much different story -
elections are *far* too important to allow that sort of thing.

Maybe *I'm* Slim Shady...


>No wonder so many foreigners listen to the BBC World Service. If you are
>going to have government-censored radio and thinly veiled propaganda you
>might as well have *good* government-censored radio and thinly veiled
>propaganda.

Yeah.  The US equivalent, National Public Radio and its relatives,
used to be a reasonably adequate knockoff of the BBC and CBC.
Over the last few years, it's increasingly turned into a
propaganda engine for corporatism, brought to you by
a grant from Archer Daniels Midland, Big Oil 1, Big Oil 2, etc.,
with less of the interesting in-depth foreign coverage.
This has unfortunately also happened to Pacifica Radio,
the socialist network that used to carry obviously slanted but
interesting coverage of international activities.
But it's now getting about 15% of its funding from the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, in spite of its previous claims
to not take corporate advertising (which would affect its content),
and it's gotten watered down to the point that it not only would
probably not fight the Seven Dirty Words You Can't Say On TV case,
it's become almost as insipid as PBS and the Capitalist Broadcasting System.