Censorship and money?
Via the NYT comes this major dilemma as a next step in the “money is speech” campaign:
The head of President Trump’s re-election campaign accused CNN of “censorship” on Tuesday afternoon after the broadcast network refused to run the group’s latest advertisement.
CNN said it would run the 30-second television spot, a celebration of Mr. Trump’s first 100 days in office, only if the campaign removed a section that featured the words “fake news” superimposed over several TV journalists, including Wolf Blitzer of CNN, and others from MSNBC, PBS, ABC and CBS.
CNN defended the decision in a statement on Twitter.
“The mainstream media is not fake news, and therefore the ad is false,” the network said. “Per our policy, it will be accepted only if that graphic is deleted.”
In response, Michael Glassner, the executive director of Mr. Trump’s campaign committee, called the decision “censorship pure and simple.”
So an author writes a manuscript and offers it to publishers for price $x. The publishers won’t publish unless price is reduced to $y (where y< x). Therefore publishers are now censoring the book the author wants published.
I want to broad cast my public square speech using a loudspeaker, but the rental company's won't rent it the system to me for less than $x and I want to pay $y (where y < x). Therefore all the rental company's are censoring my speech.
If everything has a price then the advertisement that Trump's campaign committee wants to run on CNN has a price CNN is willing to get to run the ad as is. However it appears that the campaign committee isn't willing to pay that price … whatever it might be. Therefore CNN is censoring the advertisement's message to consumers / viewers.
Apparently if money is speech but there's a price to pay in money to exercise it. The only way speech is free if money can't buy it.
It isn’t paying the price. They won’t run it with parts they feel are censorship themselves.
Bruce,
Exactly.
I am not going to run anything that I feel is full of lies. Nor should anyone else.
Pretty sure they would not run a commercial saying every bottle of this water will add a year to your life.
What I want to know is, if the networks are willing to accept purely political commercials unconnected to an election campaign, why do the Democrats never, ever run informative commercials attacking Republicans or promoting Democrats? Why are they not running commercials saying that, with footage, Republicans were giggling when they voted to kick millions out of their health insurance plans, raise the premiums for millions more, and make it much harder for people (“like you”) with any health history get insurance if they lose their job along with its benefits? And including the challenge to get every one of those 216 who voted for this abomination out of their jobs in 2018 because with that vote alone they demonstrated that they can never be trusted to hold public office again?
Too strong? Give me a break. Hell, the Democrats could not even bother themselves, even when spending public money to inform the public of the details of something new and important would have been fully justified, to run informative pieces explaining what the ACA was and what it was not. They even could have gotten by without using the “L” word if that offends too many sensibilities and used only the “F” word (“false”), when, for example, explaining there was no such thing in the law as the “death panels” some people were claiming to be there.
The Democrats seem to have no clue whatsoever that if you are going to change the minds of tens of millions of people, you have to do somethiong that reaches tens of millions of people. Letters and emails to the already committed (along with still another request for money to be spent who knows how), and speeches heard by a few thousand at most and reported by the press in severely truncated form, will never do the job.
Is it imaginable that a comprehensive, strategic television campaign to promote the things Hillary Clinton has done over the years while in or immediately next to public service (including many truly progressive things), followed by a series of commercials showing her arguing in front of small groups in favor of the some of the key elements of the Democratic platform that not only were strongly favored by progressives but also were very popular with the public, and showing her cooly explaining how the Republican proposals would fail miserably, could have improved her favorables-to-unfavorables ratio and tipped the scales enough regardless of what James Comey did? Is it not imaginable that such a strong campaign promoting her and not solely attacking Trump (which could have still been part of the mix) would have brought enough people off the couch and enough deciding not to cast worthless votes for Stein and Johnson, especially in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida and North Carolina, to secure a solid electoral and popular vote victory?
Perhaps it had nothing to do with the apocolyptic agonizing over how progressive vs “corporate” the party needs to be. It was all right there in the Democratic platform agreed to by both Bernie and Hillary: in other words it was satisfactory to virtually the entire range of Democratic voters. What we needed to see was merely the relentless and 100% accurate argument that it makes a big difference whether the candidate is a Democrat or a Republican, period. The standard progressive rant to the contrary — that there’s no difference between a “corporate” Democrat and a Republican — is demonstrably false.