Mike Pitts, a Republican state legislator in South Carolina, last week proposed a law that would require journalists in the state to sign on to a “responsible journalism registry.” For anyone who understands the issues at the heart of recent gun control debates, it was obvious the law was more of a satirical “modest proposal” than a serious one. Aside from a flurry of angry and confused tweets by journalists denouncing Pitts’s proposal, one Washington Post reporter even went so far as to write a column denouncing the proposed law. And indeed, if you swap a few key terms, the Post op-ed is a persuasive argument against gun registries. Pitts couldn’t have asked for better.
But the swift and vociferous outcry also makes The Scrapbook wonder why reporters have been strangely silent about repeated proposals from Democrats in recent years that would end up making journalism dependent on state approval.
Back in 2009, still reeling from the undercover exposé of the liberal organizing group ACORN by conservative provocateur James O’Keefe, Democratic senators Dick Durbin and Dianne Feinstein tried to legally define who was a journalist so as not to include the likes of O’Keefe. The two drafted a measure that would have left bloggers and ordinary citizens without the same legal protections as journalists and would have stripped those protections from citizens who anonymously report stories. In a fairly Orwellian fashion, they attached this as an amendment to a “press shield” law.
To their credit, some liberal bloggers such as Markos Moulitsas sounded the alarm and the amendment died. But for the most part the media didn’t rake Feinstein and Durbin over the coals as they deserved.
Much more recently, on January 14, Planned Parenthood filed suit against the Center for Medical Progress, the pro-life group that last year exposed the organization’s appalling and brisk trade in fetal body parts. Planned Parenthood has since changed the way it gets compensated for fetal tissue directly as a result of the group’s videos but continues to baselessly insist that the videos were unfair and manipulative. It’s suing the Center for Medical Progress in federal court, claiming their undercover investigation violates the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law. Planned Parenthood wants journalists with opposing views to be treated like gangsters, and yet Planned Parenthood’s many media allies have been silent. (Recall that Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse wrote a Washington Post op-ed last year arguing global warming skeptics should similarly be tried under RICO laws.)
And in the last few Democratic debates, Hillary Clinton has been vocal about wanting to overturn Citizens United, the landmark Supreme Court case on campaign finance. This particular case hinged on whether showing a film criticizing Clinton herself would constitute a campaign finance violation. During oral arguments, Obama’s deputy solicitor general argued that properly enforcing campaign finance laws might mean banning books, as well as films. In order to enforce the preferred campaign finance regime of many Democrats, the government would have to legally define who has the right to criticize politicians, as well as when and how it’s allowable. And yet, liberals claim to be scandalized the High Court found this unconstitutional.
It would be nice to see the media get half as animated about these Democratic outrages as they did about a satirical press law proposed by an obscure Republican state legislator.
