First Amendment Rights

 

            This has been a very hot and much used topic in the United States for many years.  It is also a topic that is used when comparing the freedom of speech in the US to countries like China.  And when you talk about extremes the less restrictive laws of the US are well above those of China.  Of course those of us in the US think that we are the least restrictive but Canada actually is even less so. 

            The reason that I have chosen to talk about this now is that it fits nicely behind my last blog about fibbing.  Now a storyteller who is writing fiction is allowed to stretch the truth.  They are, as a matter of fact, expected to.  But what of the press in the US today, are they allowed to stretch it?    It seems to me that with freedoms come responsibility.  A rule of law states that you have the right to scream your head off about pretty much anything that you want, but you are not allowed to yell fire in a crowded theatre.   Therein lays the responsibility.  But how is it that the press has come to a point that allows them to incite the public and to mislead them for the sake of garnering readership.  Is it not their job to report a story and not to create it? 

            The story that has my ire up is one written on one of the internet news pages that came from a television story.  The headline read; “Funeral director revives man.”  Now when I read that I got a picture in my mind of an undertaker discovering that a man in his parlor was not dead and that the funeral director revived him.  The truth is that a man who happened to be a funeral director was the first on the scene of an automobile pedestrian accident.  The pedestrian appeared to have been killed.  The man saw a passing ambulance and flagged it down and the ambulance crew, using a defibrillator, revived the pedestrian.  The only thing that the funeral director did was to flag down the ambulance.  He did not by any stretch of the imagination revive the man and the fact that he happened to be a funeral director was absolutely immaterial.  So someone needs to explain to me how the story submitted by this irresponsible reporter is any different than any fiction writer who uses an actual event to structure his story around.  The answer is NONE. 

            I for one think that there needs to be some movement on the part of the press to reign in these over zealous reporters before the government decides that it too needs to be regulated in much the same way as the irresponsible CEO’s of the banks are about to be.  When we ask the government in China to relax their laws regarding freedom of speech the request would carry a lot more weight if we could show that our freedoms are not disruptive.  After all they are a country of over a billion people and we only have a little over three hundred million.  Too many people with too much freedom can become chaotic without the element of responsibility. 

            I welcome comments on this as I know that there may be many who will have opposing viewpoints.