By now those who don’t know about Phil Robertson and the debacle at A & E are most likely among those who have no access to any kind of media. They have no idea what the world is doing, because they have no way of knowing what to pay attention to. [More ... ]
Amazing that such a law could be passed in the first place. From Alternet.
Challenges by Pennsylvania citizens and townships on provisions in the law that prohibit doctors from telling patients about health impacts related to fracking chemicals were sent back to Commonwealth Court for reevaluation. The “physician gag order” (or “ frack gag“) was recently challenged by a doctor who claimed it infringed on his First Amendment rights and his duties as a doctor, but his challenge was thrown out by a Pennsylvania court in October. The Supreme Court’s decision to send the Commonwealth Court’s decision back down for re-evaluation spells trouble for the gag order. Doctors have expressed concern over this rule in Pennsylvania and what it means for their patients — a report from Pennsylvania documented a range of health problems affecting residents living near natural gas operations, including skin rashes, headaches and chronic pain.
Glenn Greenwald takes issue with a recent comment by U.K. "journalist" Chris Blackhurst: "Edwared Snowden's secrets may be dangerous. I would not have published them." This leaves Greenwald in a state somewhere between seething and despondent:
What Blackhurst is revealing here is indeed a predominant mindset among many in the media class. Journalists should not disobey the dictates of those in power. Once national security state officials decree that what they are doing should be kept concealed from the public - once they pound their mighty "SECRET" stamp onto their behavior - it is the supreme duty of all citizens, including journalists, to honor that and never utter in public what they have done. Indeed, it is not only morally wrong, but criminal, to defy these dictates. After all, "who am I to disbelieve them?" That this mentality condemns - and would render outlawed - most of the worthwhile investigative journalism over the last several decades never seems to occur to good journalistic servants like Blackhurst. National security state officials also decreed that it would "not be in the public interest" to report on the Pentagon Papers, or the My Lai massacre, or the network of CIA black sites in which detainees were tortured, or the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program, or the documents negating claims of Iraqi WMDs, or a whole litany of waste, corruption and illegality that once bore the "top secret" label.
Propublica has organized and analyzed six recent government statements regarding the NSA that all appear to be lies.
At the U.K. Guardian, Yochai Benkler writes that the trial of Bradley Manning is about much more than Manning's freedom. And it's about much more than Wikileaks.
[T]his case is about national security journalism, not WikiLeaks. At Monday's argument in preparation for Thursday's ruling, the judge asked the prosecution to confirm: does it make any difference if it's WikiLeaks or any other news organization: New York Times, Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal? The prosecution answered: "No, it would not. It would not potentially make a difference."There are a lot of Americans who immediately write off Manning as a criminal because he leaked "secret" information (many of those people have never bothered to watch "Collateral Murder," a small but vivid and highly disturbing part of Manning's leak. How typical is this of the "fight for freedom" that has been waged in our names? We wouldn't know, because the information that has come from Iraq over the years is carefully filtered by the American military American press. In woeful ignorance, many Americans fail to see that Manning's trial is about the right of Americans's to be informed about what goes on in their name, informed enough to engage in meaningful discussion and informed enough to vote intelligently.
Leak-based journalism is not the be-all-and-end-all of journalism. But ever since the Pentagon Papers, it has been a fraught but critical part of our constitutional checks in national defense. Nothing makes this clearer than the emerging bipartisan coalition of legislators seeking a basic reassessment of NSA surveillance and Fisa oversight following Edward Snowden's leaks. National defense is special in both the need for, and dangers of, secrecy. As Justice Stewart wrote in the Pentagon Papers case, the press is particularly important in national defense because it is there that the executive is most powerful, and the other branches weakest and most deferential:In the absence of the governmental checks and balances present in other areas of our national life, the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in the areas of national defense and international affairs may lie in an enlightened citizenry – in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic government. For this reason, it is perhaps here that a press that is alert, aware, and free most vitally serves the basic purpose of the first amendment. For without an informed and free press, there cannot be an enlightened people.