This post is brought into being from watching this exchange between Chris Hayes and Jean Mayer talking about the way in which the elite media as well as the gutter media has helped Peter Schweitzer peddle the lies which the Trump regime are in trouble for expanding on. I think listening to it will help understand some of the points I'm going to make.
One of the most frustrating things about the media's now constantly pointing out that lies are killing democracy, other than them admitting that our experience in this decade disproves the widespread theory of freedom of the press and freedom of speech, is their concurrent failure to note that there is a very basic, very important distinction between freedoms and rights. It is a failure that was at the heart of the line of "free speech-free press" rulings that the past four Supreme Courts have all had a hand in, which has, with increasing obviousness, delivered us to billionaire financed fascism, rule by gangsters instead of by an adequately informed People of good will.
Let's get one thing clear to start with, there is a right of We The People to be told the truth, there is no right for the media and its employees to lie, there is no right for them to unwittingly lie. Any mistaken notion that the "freedom" granted to the "press" by the Constitution is a right is wrong, what was given to the artificial entity "the press" was a permission, it wasn't even a freedom, which is one of the more dangerous deficiencies of the language of the First Amendment. There isn't even a right endowed by The Creator to any individual that extends to their using it to deny rights as equally endowed. The freedom to violate even the most basic of rights granted by humanly constructed law, by humanly constructed and interpreted Constitutions is a permission to do what is wrong, one that in the United States gave slave owners and crooks the notion that they had a right to own other people, force them to work for them at no pay, to destroy their families, to work them to death. That is a basic problem with the United States Constitution that we still live with in merely altered expressions, not in kind from what was put into effect by Madison and Hamilton and the rest of the fabled Founders.
There is no getting around the fact that the American media, from the sewers of FOX, Sinclair, Breitbart, . . . to the sewer that is the New York Times, is the venue through which fascism came here, "freedom of the press" as interpreted by Supreme Courts, "liberal" to far right and as enjoyed and delighted in by professional scribblers, yackkers and opinion influencers WAS THE HORSE THAT FASCISM RODE IN ON. The more recent organs of influence, Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. are certainly as if not more powerful than the New York Times and FOX were in giving us Trump.
The problem is the judicial and legal theorists intentional mixing up of two distinctly different things, rights - which can inhere only to living beings and freedoms - which the Supreme Court has granted to artificial entities such as corporations and media businesses. That failure is embedded into the deeply flawed Constitution in the most ill considered of the original parts of it, the badly written Bill of Rights. The chasms of opportunity given by the slave owners and sharp businessmen to themselves by their vagueness are clearly big enough to destroy the democracy that they, by and large, didn't have any intention of risking happening. The notorious and the too little known permissions of them to enslave and steal and hoard and amass fortunes within it are matched by the merely not very well thought out. The failure to distinguish between the rights of living beings, especially People and the permissions of freedom given to artificial entities to which no rights can inhere is just the start of it.
There is no right to lie about someone else or about anything. People have no right to be mistaken that is superior to a person to not be lied about OR WE, THE PEOPLE HAVE TO THE TRUTH BEING TOLD.
There is no right granted by superior wealth to magnify lies you prefer or can benefit from, the Buckley v. Valeo, case, brought on behalf of fascism by a fascist, but which introduced the terrible idea that money equals speech into the law. You should read that opinion and the assurances that the mostly (by current standards) "liberal" justices made as to the impact of that decision on the integrity of American elections. It is a classic example of supreme judicial naivete and utter cluelessness which the entire subsequent history of the United States proves to have ushered in a disaster for democracy.
The United States Supreme Court, the legislature, even The People voting as a majority does not create rights, those inhere to living beings as an endowment of The Creator, as the founding document of the United States as an independent country said - something which should have the most profound influence on all of this talk of "rights" and "freedoms". There is an absolute right of The People to not be lied to by mass media, THERE IS AS IMPORTANT A RIGHT OF EVERYONE THAT THE MAJORITY OF THOSE WHO VOTE AND LIVE IN A SOCIETY NOT BE PEDDLED LIES SOLD TO THEM ON THEIR GREATEST WEAKNESSES AND DEFECTS OF CHARACTER.
There is no right for the media to lie, there isn't even one to mistakenly report lies as the truth, AS THE NEW YORK TIMES HAS DONE TO AS GREAT DAMAGE AS ANY OTHER ORGAN OF THE MEDIA. There is no right to present lies as "it's being said that" one of the favorite means of the New York Times, NPR and other supposedly superior media venues to include and repeat the lies of billionaire gangsters, generated through their paid liars like Schweitzer.
The concern that is everywhere about the way that recent Supreme Court rulings have opened us up to the corruption of foreign billionaires, those who run gangster governments, as Putin does and those who are merely hoping to benefit financially or out of some malignant ideological preference for gangster rule to democracy, is understandable but it is as short sighted as all of the talk of rights and the mistaking of permissions to corporations as freedoms. Domestic billionaries, millionaires and haters of democracy are as dangerous as Putin or Erdogan or the rising class of ruler gangsters in so many places. Those are the people who own the media in the United States, the media which will only be as honest, as enabling of self-government by an adequately informed People of good will as they will be made to be by laws. The phrasing of the First Amendment with its breezy, even stirring 18th century poetry is disastrously non-specific as to the obligation that should not only be understood BUT STATED UNAMBIGUOUSLY IN WRITING SO EASY THAT EVEN A LAW SCHOLAR OR JUDGE CAN UNDERSTAND IT that there is freedom granted for the media to tell the truth, there is an obligation that comes with that that they serve the right of all of us to have our neighbors and those who we know nothing about but whose votes clear across the country have the most direct impact on our lives to know the truth and that truth to make us free.
That is what I was saying yesterday, that is what I will say until I stop saying anything.
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