Respectfully submitted by Lawrence Rafferty (rafflaw)-Guest Blogger
I am sure you have all seen the comments and political advertisements and articles calling President Obama a Communist, a Socialist, a Kenyan citizen and various attempts to claim that he is a secret Muslim. I had thought I had seen them all when I came across the latest affront to reality. A Gannet newspaper in Louisiana has agreed to run an “interesting” advertisement from an organization calling itself the SOAR Project. SOAR stands for Save Our American Republic.
In my humble opinion, this advertisement goes far beyond any level of reasonableness when it leads with the question, “Will Obama and the Democrats Shoot Catholics and Christians “?
The Gannet Advertiser has approved the advertisement that tries to claim that Obama will shoot Catholics just like the Mexican Government killed a Catholic priest in 1927! I am all for almost unlimited free speech and that includes garbage like this ad, but I am curious if the Gannet Advertiser would approve an advertisement that makes the ridiculous claim that Mitt Romney will hang all African Americans if elected, as suggested by one of the commenters on the Think Progress site?
“The ad shows a photograph of a Catholic priest who was shot and killed in Mexico in the 1920s, and suggests that President Obama and Democrats would do the same evil deed. It was posted by a user on Reddit this morning. The ad copy is no better:
“AMERICA is under siege by the same evil (obama and democrats) as history shows over and over…We must learn from it or we are doomed to repeat it. We must be triumphant over terror.”
As with most newspapers, The Daily Advertiser says it does screen advertisements to ensure that blatantly false, overly offensive or otherwise inappropriate content is kept out of the paper. But the paper’s president and publisher Karen J. Lincoln told ThinkProgress that the newspaper stood by its decision to run the ad. “We look at all of the ads, and the decision is made by each market,” she said. “This ad did meet our standards. The decision to run it was approved.” Lincoln also says that another ad from the same organization will run in tomorrow’s paper.” Think Progress
While this SOAR organization has the right to spew as much hate and lies as it wants, the amazing part is that the Daily Advertiser claimed that this garbage actually meets their “standards”! If this advertisement meets the paper’s standards, then the door should be wide open for any lie and disparaging advertisement to be run by that very same newspaper. If this ad meets the standards, is there any advertisement that won’t be accepted by the Daily Advertiser?
I searched the website for this newspaper and I found nothing that discusses just what are its standards for advertisements. The Advertiser Maybe you will have better luck than me in finding out just what standards The Advertiser uses to review proposed advertisements. Can you think of any advertisement that would not be accepted under these allegedly loose standards?
Can or should anything be done to prevent this kind of hate filled lies to be published by any newspaper? Does this kind of brutally false claim amount to actual malice and therefore allow Obama to sue the paper and/or the organization paying for the advertisement for defamation? Let’s hear your thoughts and ideas!
Additional Sources: Miami Herald Publishing Co. V. Tornillo; New York Times v. Sullivan
“Political speech to me is something criticizing the government”
That is not always true. When, for example, two candidates not in office discuss each other, neither is an agent of government.
“I do not want government to have the final say over whether or not something a citizen says is a threat to government. “
Government already does that and has been doing it for years in the name of national security. Government has been regulating many types of speech for years simply to protect the public from unpopular ideas – keeping porn out of site for the protection of minors, for example.
“Would we want our speech limited to what we can factually prove, with evidence before a jury, is absolutely true?”
No, we would not want that. But why would the republic fall if we demanded that corporate entities that called themselves Newspapers or News programs be required not to deliberately present falsehoods as truth? Why in a representative democracy should The Press be allowed to shirk their public responsibilities and actually be allowed to disseminate unadulterated propaganda?
A free press has rights, but it also has crucially important responsibilities. The Press is different than a person. It has a higher standard to maintain.
And it is not as if determining whether Fox News is a lying sack of shit or not is that difficult a problem. Allowing a corporate entity that presents itself as a member of the press to be nothing more than than a propaganda outfit is absolute madness.
And remember – Fox News is an extension of government! It is wholly controlled by and subservient to the needs of Republican governmental officials. Are you saying that that a government-controlled propaganda outfit should be allowed to call itself a news program and present deliberate falsehoods? Government has no responsibility to be truthful to the public?
In this case, I don’t care what the circulation is or how far the reach, nobody of either party should try to prohibit political lies, for the chilling effect that would have on speech, and the slippery slope it presents.
Political speech to me is something criticizing the government. The establishment of any standard of truth in that regard opens the door to the government suppressing criticism of itself. Combine that with the uneven application of the law by police, public attorneys like prosecutors, and ideologically or otherwise biased judges, and the result is reluctance of anybody that hasn’t studied law, or cannot afford to have an attorney on call, to criticize government for fear of being deemed a criminal for their speech.
On this blog we call government corrupt, in the pocket of corporations, we say they are willing to kill soldiers for political gain and private profit. We say the Republican plan for health care is “die faster.”
Would we want our speech limited to what we can factually prove, with evidence before a jury, is absolutely true?
Short of calling for direct violent action (like assassination) against a specific official, I would not criminalize speech at all, not even a wrist slap misdemeanor with a $5 fine. Even if it has a political effect, even if people are believing it, even if it causes somebody to unfairly lose a race: That is a small price to pay for preserving our own rights to hyperbole, being misinformed, misguided, ignorant or incautious.
I do not want government to have the final say over whether or not something a citizen says is a threat to government. That is a dangerous self-reinforcing feedback loop that results in oppression by the government with no way to even discuss oppression by the government.
Freedom of speech can not be misused or abused.
Whoever uses it, it serves its purpose.
It clearly serves to aid categoriezing people and putting them neatly into their respective boxes.
Idiots and non-idiots.
Is the failure of freedom of speech can not prevent propagnada from registering in the minds of the naive? Nay, say I.
That is another task needing the unabated help of freedom of speech.
I believe our Constitution protects the freedom of speech no matter if you agree with it or not. Fox News, in my opinion, definitely reports on issues showing both sides, whereas I don’t see that on MSNBC or CNN at all. The latter two seem to be headed by the Obama administration. As the Nader article points out, this administration is becoming an almost tyrannical power and it is starting to scare a great many people. The NDAA 2012 law, which makes it legal to imprison anyone indefinitely, including US citizens, is beyond shocking, not to mention the drones which are starting to be utitlized. As far as Obama’s citizenship, as Americans, we have a right to explore whether a person who serves us as president, is in fact, a US citizen and if you’ve really looked at the evidence, you have to admit that there is more than compelling evidence to prove that his birth certificate and selective service card were forgeries. That should shock any American citizen yet the story is NEVER covered on MSNBC nor CNN and rarely on FOX. This is OUR country. A president is not “holy,” he is elected by us to serve us. I can guarantee you that if GWB’s citizenship had been in question, it would’ve been the number 1 news story on every station.
Mike A,
Ditto….
This ad actually says that all Democrats and Obama are neither Christian nor Catholic. That is such an insult to all Democrats who ARE Christian and Catholic. All Democrats who have subscription to that newspaper should cancel their subscriptions and stop buying it on the newstand.
The airwaves are public property, and are regulated by the government. There are international treaties of cooperation on use of the airwaves by assigning frequencies for special use. That is why your FM and AM bands are all in one place and you can find them on your radio. Cable is not the airwaves. Cable does not go out on the air, but is confined to a cable of some kind. When cable signals are broadcast, they are dedicated microwave signals for use in sending the signal over long distances, and are not able to be intercepted by any casual user. Most current cables are either coaxial or fiber optic. Those are almost all privately owned and bandwidth is rented to both sender and end user by the cable owner. The government is not involved in private cable content.
I am not sure that cable and the airwaves are that different. Both represent bandwidth that is owned by the government and rented to corporations under conditions. I am quite certain that the airwaves involve a charter of conduct – I don’t know about cable.
Really I was asking a question:
to those of you who are lawyers and may be familiar with the airwaves charters under which corporations are obligated, is there a legal argument which would extend that concept to the other government-owned bandwidths that are leased out to corporations? Keep in mind that with the airwaves, news programs are expected to report news accurately,ie, in the public interest as an important provider of information crucial to the functioning of a democracy.
I don’t see why this obligation would not also extend to cable TV and might also be applicable to news organizations on the internet. And if not, why not?
Why is it not considered outrageous that news organizations using public spaces would be allowed to deliberately lie? It is Orwellian, it seems to me, and I would love to see a motivated attorney or two try to make headway in this area.
Anybody?
CLH,
I think the only standards is collecting their advertising fee
Jill,
While I agree that the kill list is improper, Mr Nader lost me when he quoted Michael Hayden.
Thanks, Jill.
rafflaw- Standards? From this newspaper? That’s comedy gold. It’s like the one about the Republican who reformed finance regulations.
Let’s do talk about some facts! Not easy facts that comfort liberals. Real facts that mean something to every person in the world.
May 31, 2012
Where are the Lawyers?
Obama At Large
by RALPH NADER
The rule of law is rapidly breaking down at the top levels of our government. As officers of the court, we have sworn to “support the Constitution,” which clearly implies an affirmative commitment on our part.
Take the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The conservative American Bar Association sent three white papers to President Bush describing his continual unconstitutional policies. Then and now civil liberties groups and a few law professors, such as the stalwart David Cole of Georgetown University and Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, have distinguished themselves in calling out both presidents for such violations and the necessity for enforcing the rule of law.
Sadly, the bulk of our profession, as individuals and through their bar associations, has remained quietly on the sidelines. They have turned away from their role as “first-responders” to protect the Constitution from its official violators.
As a youngster in Hawaii, basketball player Barack Obama was nicknamed by his schoolboy chums as “Barry O’Bomber,” according to the Washington Post. Tuesday’s (May 29) New York Times published a massive page-one feature article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, that demonstrated just how inadvertently prescient was this moniker. This was not an adversarial, leaked newspaper scoop. The article had all the signs of cooperation by the three dozen, interviewed current and former advisers to President Obama and his administration. The reporters wrote that a weekly role of the president is to personally select and order a “kill list” of suspected terrorists or militants via drone strikes or other means. The reporters wrote that this personal role of Obama’s is “without precedent in presidential history.” Adversaries are pulling him into more and more countries – Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other territories.
The drones have killed civilians, families with small children, and even allied soldiers in this undeclared war based on secret “facts” and grudges (getting even). These attacks are justified by secret legal memos claiming that the president, without any Congressional authorization, can without any limitations other that his say-so, target far and wide assassinations of any “suspected terrorist,” including American citizens.
The bombings by Mr. Obama, as secret prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner, trample proper constitutional authority, separation of powers, and checks and balances and constitute repeated impeachable offenses. That is, if a pathetic Congress ever decided to uphold its constitutional responsibility, including and beyond Article I, section 8’s war-declaring powers.
As if lawyers needed any reminding, the Constitution is the foundation of our legal system and is based on declared, open boundaries of permissible government actions. That is what a government of law, not of men, means. Further our system is clearly demarked by independent review of executive branch decisions – by our courts and Congress.
What happens if Congress becomes, in constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein’s words, “an ink blot,” and the courts beg off with their wholesale dismissals of Constitutional matters based on claims and issue involves a “political question” or that parties have “no-standing-to-sue.” What happens is what is happening. The situation worsens every year, deepening dictatorial secretive decisions by the White House, and not just regarding foreign and military policies.
The value of The New York Times article is that it added ascribed commentary on what was reported. Here is a sample:
– The U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron P. Munter, quoted by a colleague as complaining about the CIA’s strikes driving American policy commenting that he: “didn’t realize his main job was to kill people.” Imagine what the sidelined Foreign Service is thinking about greater longer-range risks to our national security.
– Dennis Blair, former Director of National Intelligence, calls the strike campaign “dangerously seductive.” He said that Obama’s obsession with targeted killings is “the politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no US casualties, gives the appearance of toughness. It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.” Blair, a retired admiral, has often noted that intense focus on strikes sidelines any long-term strategy against al-Qaeda which spreads wider with each drone that vaporizes civilians.
– Former CIA director Michael Hayden decries the secrecy: “This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president and that’s not sustainable,” he told the Times. “Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a D.O.J. [Department of Justice] safe.”
Consider this: an allegedly liberal former constitutional law lecturer is being cautioned about blowback, the erosion of democracy and the national security by former heads of super-secret spy agencies!
Secrecy-driven violence in government breeds fear and surrender of conscience. When Mr. Obama was campaigning for president in 2007, he was reviled by Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden Jr. and Mitt Romney – then presidential candidates – for declaring that even if Pakistan leaders objected, he would go after terrorist bases in Pakistan. Romney said he had “become Dr. Strangelove,” according to the Times. Today all three of candidate Obama’s critics have decided to go along with egregious violations of our Constitution.
The Times made the telling point that Obama’s orders now “can target suspects in Yemen whose names they do not know.” Such is the drift to one-man rule, consuming so much of his time in this way at the expense of addressing hundreds of thousands of preventable fatalities yearly here in the U.S. from occupational disease, environmental pollution, hospital infections and other documented dangerous conditions.
Based on deep reporting, Becker and Shane allowed that “both Pakistan and Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to the United States than when Obama became president.”
In a world of lawlessness, force will beget force, which is what the CIA means by “blowback.” Our country has the most to lose when we abandon the rule of law and embrace lawless violence that is banking future revenge throughout the world.
The people in the countries we target know what we must remember. We are their occupiers, their invaders, the powerful supporters for decades of their own brutal tyrants. We’re in their backyard, which more than any other impetus spawned al-Qaeda in the first place.
So lawyers of America, apart from a few stalwarts among you, what is your breaking point? When will you uphold your oath of office and work to restore constitutional authorities and boundaries?
Someday, people will ask – where were the lawyers?”
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate
http://goo.gl/ILWlR
ot
http://fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/bilderberg-2012-official-list-of-attendees/15678
Challenging post rafflaw. Well said.
There are two problems; 1) children are not taught by parents or in school to think critically and, 2) especially in the USofA where voting is non-compulsory, the populace is fundamentally lazy. The 4th Estate can get away with anything because no-one questions the absurd making it economic to profit from bullshit.
You get the media/”speech” you so deserve. Well done.
There is no lawsuit here. However, the ad will be seen by many. Lafayette lies in a heavily Catholic region of Louisiana, and the ad is obviously an attempt to stoke Catholic fears. Of course, if the dim bulbs at SOAR actually went past fifth grade, they would know that many Catholic priests were killed in the Mexican revolution. Some folks can’t even do fear properly.
Rafflaw,
I think it’s a terrible ad, bogus and hateful, but I am not convinced at all that with a circulation of 45,000 people there is a problem here worthy asking “Should Obama sue the paper”
Should Obama sue the paper? Only in Gannett’s and Fox’s wildest wet dreams.
Funny how Obama gets all this flack about his birth certificate, from when he was running against John McCain… who actually WAS born on foreign soil…
anon,
The issue isn’t the circulation numbers. It is the words used.
puzzling, it doesn’t matter who is using lies. Is that an example of actual malice?