Home | About | Donate

Spicer Confirms White House Actively Planning Attack on Press Freedoms

News & Views
#1

Spicer Confirms White House Actively Planning Attack on Press Freedoms

Jon Queally, staff writer

White House press secretary Sean Spicer confirmed Monday that the Trump administration is actively—and in his words "substantively"—reviewing the nation's libel laws as it explores ways it could more easily sidestep First Amendment protections by targeting press coverage or news stories it deems objectionable.

On Sunday morning, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus told ABC's "This Week" that reworking libel law legislation is "something that we've looked at, and how that gets executed or whether that goes anywhere is a different story."

3 Likes
#2

Goebbels would be proud to see how the Trump Regime is refining the work he pioneered.

15 Likes
#3

“[W}hether that goes anywhere is a different story.”: damn right.

2 Likes
#4

Geez! Where oh where is my bottle of Phuck-it-All pills?
My damn face hurts because of the constant face-palms.

2 Likes
#5

Democratic politicians will continue to sit on their hands, which is more than seditious Republican pols will do (their specialty: doing nothing).

4 Likes
#6

The new department will be named Propaganda Ministry (Rupert Murdoch, director) and a new cabinet will be formed called the Trump Reich Chamber (Steve Breitbart, cabinet secretary) to oversee all press operations nationwide while preparing their own “news” for distribution via radio, TV, internet, and print.

If the Trump Trash Tribe does not like the laws, then the demonic demagogue simply chooses/mandates/demands the laws to be changed and his flying monkeys carry out the message.

Satanic and criminal.

4 Likes
#7

Right, and we’ll be lucky if this is “all” that happens.

3 Likes
#8

This should fire up Trump’s right wing base even more. No longer would they have to endure harsh criticism in the papers and on television about the wannabe dictator they are so fond of. Now these proud Americans won’t have to move to Russia to live under a dictator, they can stay right here and watch NASCAR races on TV as much as they want and enjoy the fruits of a dictatorship they actually voted for. .

#9

trump greatly admires authoritarian leaders like North Korean Kim Jung Un, whom he is now praising. A recent news report described how North Korea controls the “news” that its people get: there is no internet access, no privately operated media, only government owned and controlled media that feed the government message to the people. Citizens see and hear only what their Dear Leader wants them to know. I’m guessing that the “Current Resident” would just love to have similar control over media messages. Ain’t going to happen of course, but we may have some serious battles ahead to protect that pesky First Amendment thingy.

5 Likes
#10

In the Third Reich, if you were caught listening to anything but the Reich propaganda stations, you might be shot immediately. If not, you got a chance to be worked to death in a concentration camp.

  • Can you imagine what the midge-minds in power in the US Fourth Reich might come up with if We the People keep listening and contributing to free speech instead of poisoning our minds with fuxnews, sitcoms and “The Big Game”?
    ;-})
1 Like
#11

Impeach the president now. Send him and his cult family back to New York. What did we expect from a man who loves Putin and Bannon and quotes Benito Mussolini. Gets his news and info from Fox and the National Inquirer.

4 Likes
#12

Lawsuits could help get at the truth if wealth was not the deciding factor.

Direct Democracy

2 Likes
#13

Controlling the media and truth is the first requirement of a tyrant.

3 Likes
#14

And this is what we were ostensibly fighting against during the Cold War and the Soviet Union.

#16

I’m not holding my breath on this one. Trump and his minions can’t even define “ethics” properly. And their immigration regulations sunk like a stone in court.

Maybe we can designate some of the federal budget toward law school educations for these bright bulbs?

3 Likes
#17

In their histrionics here, people underestimate how this issue is a two edged sword that would bite the corporate media MUCH harder as to their incessant lying and personal attacks on progressives than it would as to Republicans and Republicrats.

#18

Way too much would depend on whether those progressives had the deep pockets required to sue the MSM. The deeper pockets are on the MSM side when it comes to progressives so this is not a solution to your stated problem. It’s far more common for progressive voices to be shut out, not maligned directly, so this, so-called, ‘two-edged sword’ is inapplicable to that…

#19

If there were a lesser standard of proof and ‘malice’ (in the sense of NY Times v. Sullivan and its progeny) then progressive public figures would have long ago held the AM hate radio and Fox 'news types -et al. to account (or bankrupted them) via attorney’s working on a contingent fee basis.

Remember: NY Time v. Sullivan was a case decided when there were media regulations on broadcasters that not only placed disincentives on license renewals for serial lying and unfounded personal attacks, but also provided a remedy in the form of the ability to correct the record with broadcast time.

1 Like
#20

What ever happened to the “state’s rights” presidency?

There are no federal libel laws that I’m aware of.

FREE AMERICA

DIRECT DEMOCRACY

1 Like
#21

In some parallel universe the meaner, harsher libel laws will be used against the meaner, harsher New York Times. They just hired a professional climate denier, a guy who has no particular use for fact checking, moving the NYT into its new role: a paper that no longer has any particular use for printing true things.

“Fair and Balanced”. “We Report, You Decide”.

5 Likes