We have long discussed the collapse of free speech values in France as the left criminalizes an ever-widening scope of opposing viewpoints. Conservative groups are denouncing a new such case targeting conservative media. CNEWS was fined and forced to apologize on air after a journalist referred to abortion as the world’s leading cause of death.
CNEWS is owned by Catholic businessman Vincent Bolloré. Presenter Aymeric Pourbaix made the statement during a Catholic program called “En quête d’esprit” (or “In Search of Spirit.”) Whatever that search may have found in terms of spirit, it certainly found censorship.
The program showed a graph on the causes of death that put abortion on top, with 73 million deaths each year worldwide. That constitutes 52% of annual deaths, far ahead of cancer (10 million) and smoking (6.2 million).
The French media regulatory authority Arcom imposed a fine of 100,000 euros and compelled CNEWS to apologize on the air. It was the full monty of censorship, combining a penalty with compelled speech. Arcom found that the network had failed its “obligation of honesty and rigor in the presentation and processing of information.” It declared that “Abortion cannot be presented as a cause of death.”
Obviously, many people around the world view abortion as the death of a human being. However, the press and pundits on the left went ballistic at the statement and called for a crackdown by the government. It is now a violation of law to call abortion a cause of death.
Journalists joined the call for censorship and accused the network of publishing biased and dangerous ideas.
The network was beaten into submission and apologized “for the people who may have been hurt by this infographic.”
Barring people from calling abortion a cause of death is only the latest speech crackdown in a nation that prides itself as a cradle of liberty.
France has been a leader in the rollback on free speech in the West with ever widening laws curtailing free speech. These laws criminalize speech under vague standards referring to “inciting” or “intimidating” others based on race or religion. For example, fashion designer John Galliano has been found guilty in a French court on charges of making anti-Semitic comments against at least three people in a Paris bar. At his sentencing, Judge Anne Marie Sauteraud read out a list of the bad words used by Galliano to Geraldine Bloch and Philippe Virgitti, including using ‘dirty whore” in criticism.
In another case, the father of French conservative presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was fined because he had called people from the Roma minority “smelly.” A French teenager was charged for criticizing Islam as a “religion of hate.”
This is a nation that still echoes the cry of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity (“liberté, égalité, fraternité”). However, in today’s France, “liberté” is no longer valued. Individual rights of religion and speech are routinely sacrificed in the name of “equity” and “fraternity.”
In my book The Indispensable Right, I discuss how free speech is in a virtual free fall in Europe. As we face our own growing anti-free speech movement, citizens need to take a long look at countries like France to see what awaits us down this path. Europe went down this slippery slope of censorship decades ago, and the desire to silence others has now become an insatiable appetite.
If we are to protect a right that, more than any other, defines us, we must hold the line against this global movement.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
“The program showed a graph on the causes of death that put abortion on top, with 73 million deaths each year worldwide. That constitutes 52% of annual deaths, far ahead of…”
This is factually incorrect. Early spontaneous miscarriage (the post-fertilization zygote dying of natural genetic defects within the first 72 hours) greatly exceeds abortion as the leading cause of death. This assumes that personhood begins at conception, the same assumption behind the CNEWS chart. If factual accuracy is valued, the chart should look like this:
Cause of death per year %
Early miscarriage 130,000,000 48%
Abortion 73,000,000 27%
Cardiovascular 46,000,000 17%
Miscarriage 25,000,000 9%
Cancer 18,000,000 7%
You can’t have it both ways. If personhood begins at conception, these are the rank-ordered causes of death.
If I were CNEWS, I would make this correction, and apologize for the error.
But abortion is still a cause of death. That’s what the government is censoring. You missed the main point and focused on a red herring.
You’re missing the point. If abortion is a cause of death, but then so is early genetic miscarriage, nature’s way of culling the defective concepta. I’m suggesting a way for CNEWS to get the French govt. to drop the charges, by admitting that the chart had an error (by discounting early genetic miscarriage), and republish it corrected.
It would put the govt. in an awkward position of then having to deny that early genetic miscarriage is a cause of death. The French embryology experts would side with CNEWS on this assertion.
The way to beat back infowarfare-style censorship is to become ever more truthful and candid, but without ceding your right to be so. That strategy will f’ them up because they’re not expecting it.
Okay I didn’t pick that up from your first comment. I agree that’s a creative idea.
* How are the stats gathered for zygote death within 72 hours of conception?
” That strategy will f’ them up because they’re not expecting it.”
You tremendously overestimate the French government’s (or most any other) regard for fact, and way underestimate how much of it they are capable of blindly disregarding to harp on their chosen message, no matter how misplaced or contradicted by those facts. My take is that your strategy would change nothing with respect to the government response, and be of no benefit. Good thinking: just beneficently giving credit for rationality to those who are completely and profoundly irrational.
Between yesterday and today: France and England have gone full fascist less than 80 years after fascism was defeated in Europe.
I am beginning to resent all those would-be socialist/woke insipid dullards for all the lost blood and treasure we have spent saving their sorry *sses. I am more in favor of Putin, at this point, than I am in favor of the heads of all these far/left dominions safely exuding their poisonous bilge from behind the safety of American military power protecting their sorry *sses. At least Putin has a backbone and is more of a traditionalist than any duped/indoctrinated lefty in the european union.
Why would you accept either?….falling into the dichotomization trap?…where the 2 forced choices have you giving up your dearly held principles?
When flummoxed by non achievement, you create something irrelevant to attack.
I have lots of experiential evidence of people not wanting me to express myself freely, so why should they be able to?
The cow in a mellow green ball ran that delectable debonair hatter from the cow.
The election is over. Stop quoting Kamal Harris’ interview responses.
Taking ones freedom to speak away is bad. 100 times worse if forcing speech!
>>> We now have X/twitter spreading lies at such a vociferous rate that the truth can’t keep up. And when it does, i.e. immigrants eating pets, then they just lie more about it and say the reason they lie is to prove a point.
What exactly is a “vociferous” rate?
>>> What if more speech is just more lies? Where does this lead?
Well, I think in your case it is more lies. But the thing about a lie is that it’s rarely able to sustain itself. Which explains why Democrats find they no longer have a voice on X/ Twitter. But not the first time the left has lost its online presence and/ or voice. The same occurred with political forums of the Obama era.
How is criminalizing speech (and thought) different from the CCP criminalizing democracy demonstrators, and speech and press freedoms in Hong Kong? It’s not. The “free world” needs to wake up, and fast.
Should Ukraine be considered part of the free world?
The more countries there are in the free world, the better it is for Freedom.
Me: the Dodgers belong in Brooklyn.
You: that reminds me, Ukraine …
“Should Ukraine be considered part of the free world?”
Ukraine has outlawed political parties that dissent from Zelinskyy’s edicts. So, in answer to your question, abso-fvcking-lutely NOT.
* you left out magical thinking.
JT likes to say that the cure for bad speech is more speech. But what if you have a firehose of lies?
‘A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.’
We now have X/twitter spreading lies at such a vociferous rate that the truth can’t keep up. And when it does, i.e. immigrants eating pets, then they just lie more about it and say the reason they lie is to prove a point.
What if more speech is just more lies? Where does this lead?
Ron White would like a word.
I have a Haitian colleague. He vociferously denied that Haitians could ever possibly eat pets. “We love cats!” he protested … but he was forced to admit that half the country practices Voodoo and therefore animal sacrifices are very well spread. Eating a feline might be taboo, but slicing apart it’s belly whilst alive to read the future in the dying cat’s entrails is fair game.
I’ll excuse an Ohio local for not appreciating the subtle differences between the two.
Abortion causes the death of fetus. That’s science and we believe science is real.
People who go by the term trans woman are biological males. They have a significant advantage in competitive sports over actual women. That’s science and we believe science is real.
We say these things because they are true. It is their truth that strikes fear into the hearts of the science deniers who seek to censor such statements.
That saying is from the ACLU, it didn’t originate with Professor T.
“‘Supermajority was broken’: Dems make ‘historic’ gains in state capitols despite Trump win”
“The ‘Landslide’ That Wasn’t: Trump and Allies Pump Up His Narrow Victory”
“Trump’s win was real but not a landslide. Here’s where it ranks”
“But it was far short of Barack Obama’s 365 electoral votes in 2008 and 332 in 2012.”
Wait, I thought it was a landslide for trump? Obama did better than trump?
Wow, the orange god has to be upset about that.
Ron White would like to have another word with you.
He got more votes than Obama, despite being outspent by over a factor of two and having the mass media spew lies for over nine years about him – no, there was never a Russiagate, only a DC collusion which should have been charged as a RICO.
For what it’s worth I supported Jill Stein because Trump or no Trump, Democrats are loathsome creatures.
Pay whatever fine but keep resisting the let’s assault on free speech. It’s the only option until the left is reduced to a few odd wildmen barking at the moon.
Relatively speaking, they are a few. But they have the bully pulpit. Nevertheless, never accept even the smallest of penalties for exercising your natural rights.
If you resist the fine, the next step for a regime such as is currently found in France, is imprisonment. There is no “legal” resistance that will alleviate the situation but the defeat of these woke fascists.
Got to love those Europeans. Now why did my ancestors come here again.
Once again, leave it to the Idiot European Illuminati to find vocalization of independent thought as a trigger for the weakest minds among them. Calling the scrambling of early human life anything other than a cause of death is a misnomer. Would the shivering terrorized leftists have been fine with “a leading cause of termination?” Doubtful!! Soon crimes of rape and assault will need to be referred to as negative encounters – what morons!!
Then, don’t go to France. See, that was easy.
Then, don’t go to France.
What a moral and intellectual bankrupt way to go through life. That would certainly explain why you routinely defend the Democratic party.
If only we could prevent their pernicious, demented ideology from seeping into every crevice of international life via this entity called “the internet”. Avoiding the land-based idiots will not contain their evil ideology. That must be resisted at all points with all effort. Would you tell us to avoid France if it were the epicenter of some lethal disease that can be spread through the air – of course not; we would quarantine such a place and then disinfect it. Now do you understand why we cannot just ignore these imbeciles?
Mostly agree. However, a public campaign to deprive them of tourist income, that clearly states the denial of free speech as the reason, might have some effect, long term, If not on the government, on the people whose livelihoods would be impacted directly, and its their job to bring down their rulers, in necessary.
World travelers should begin voting with their feet and their wallets where inhospitable countries are concerned. Stay away.
People are stupid and they shouldn’t have any political power. They should just be nuked.
Is not abortion a “reproductive service” to some in the USA?
It is anti-reproductive.
People don’t care about my rights so why should I care about theirs?
No one cades about you or your rights.
Thank you for confirming this. Now I can execute the plan.
The only plan you have is to live in you moms basement and eat hotpockets.
Then why should I show no interest in your right to life by gassing you?
The only person you can gas is yourself. Loʻks like you succeeded.
OK, how’s this then: “72.99 Million worthless lives saved and a 10,000 rape/incest victims spared child birth”
Or: “Declaring speech illegal becoming a leading cause of death for administration officials.”
“Declaring speech illegal becoming a leading cause of death for administration officials.”
I could support making this wish a reality.
73 million worldwide? Damn! 😢
🤔 What then? End-of-life care? Assisted fetal suicide? Can’t just put “Other”.
Aha! No wonder they desperately want to not call this the death of a human being. That way you cannot include abortion as a cause of human death.
Problem solved.
“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness….they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools…”
Romans 1:18
https://biblehub.com/romans/1-18.htm