Carl Paladino's Journalist-Ban, First-Amendment Problem : It's All Politics : NPR

Carl Paladino's Journalist-Ban, First-Amendment Problem : It's All Politics : NPR



Carl Paladino, the Republican nominee in the New York governor's race, seems to misunderstand how the news media work. And maybe the First Amendment, too.

In an interview with Fox Business News' Judge Napolitano on the program "Freedom Watch" that's scheduled to be shown Saturday, Paladino appears to believe that it's his call whether Fredric Dicker, the New York Post reporter he had his infamous hallway confrontation with, covers his campaign.

Paladino said:

“This reporter is a person that should be out of this campaign. I want him out. My daughter - I worry about her every day, I worry about her security.”

Unfortunately for Paladino, it's not up to him whether Dicker covers his campaign or not. First, that's a decision that can only be made by Dicker's bosses at the New York Post.

And few things get editors' backs up more than when they believe someone, especially a politician, is trying to bully or intimidate them into changing their coverage decisions.

Second, there's the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Now, Paladino is supported by the Tea Party movement, which has placed adherence to the first principles of the Constitution at the top of its agenda.

And the Framers couldn't have been clearer; government was not to interfere with press freedom. That would include decisions like who does and doesn't cover a political campaign for government office.

So some reporters may want to ask Paladino, who wants to be governor of a state that operates under the U.S. Constitution and who is also a lawyer, how his demand that Dicker be removed from covering his campaign squares with the spirit of Constitution?

True, he's not governor yet. But there's no indication he wouldn't make a similar demand as New York's chief executive.

Still, how does his wish to ban a reporter from his campaign mesh with the First Amendment? The people of New York, including reporters, have a right to an answer.

Even though he is a law school graduate he has little understanding of the First Amendment.

John H. Armwood

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We've Seen This Movie Before - NYTimes.com

We've Seen This Movie Before - NYTimes.com

We’ve Seen This Movie Before

By STANLEY FISH

Stanley Fish on education, law and society.

In the first column I ever wrote for this newspaper (“How the Right Hijacked the Magic Words”), I analyzed the shift in the rhetoric surrounding the Oklahoma City bombing once it became clear that the perpetrator was Timothy McVeigh, who at one point acknowledged that “The Turner Diaries,” a racist anti-government tract popular in Christian Identity circles, was his bible.

Associated Press An evidence photo of Timothy McVeigh taken April 19, 1995, just hours after the Oklahoma City bombing.

In the brief period between the bombing and the emergence of McVeigh, speculation had centered on Arab terrorists and the culture of violence that was said to be woven into the fabric of the religion of Islam.

But when it turned out that a white guy (with the help of a few of his friends) had done it, talk of “culture” suddenly ceased and was replaced by the vocabulary and mantras of individualism: each of us is a single, free agent; blaming something called “culture” was just a way of off-loading responsibility for the deeds we commit; in America, individuals, not groups, act; and individuals, not groups, should be held accountable. McVeigh may have looked like a whole lot of other guys who dressed up in camouflage and carried guns and marched in the woods, but, we were told by the same people who had been mouthing off about Islam earlier, he was just a lone nut, a kook, and generalizations about some “militia” culture alive and flourishing in the heartland were entirely unwarranted.

This switch from “malign culture” talk to “individual choice” talk was instantaneous and no one felt obliged to explain it. Now, in 2010, it’s happening again around the intersection of what the right wing calls the “Ground Zero mosque” (a geographical exaggeration if there ever is one) and the attack last week on a Muslim cab driver by (it is alleged) 21-year-old knife-wielding Michael Enright.

First the mosque. It is wrong, we hear, to regard the proposed mosque or community center as an ordinary exercise of free enterprise and freedom of religion by the private owners of a piece of property. It is, rather, a thumb in the eye or a slap in the face of the 9/11 victims and their families, a potential clearinghouse for international terrorist activities, a “victory mosque” memorializing a great triumph of jihad and a monument to the religion in whose name and by whose adherents the dreadful deed was done.

But according to the same folks who oppose the mosque because of what it stands for, Michael Enright’s act doesn’t stand for anything and is certainly not the product of what Time magazine calls a growing “American strain of Islamophobia.” Instead, The New York Post declares, the stabbing is “the act of a disturbed individual who is now in custody,” and across the fold of the page columnist Jonah Goldberg says that “one assault doesn’t a national trend make” and insists that “we shouldn’t let anyone suggest that this criminal reflects anybody but himself.”

The formula is simple and foolproof (although those who deploy it so facilely seem to think we are all fools): If the bad act is committed by a member of a group you wish to demonize, attribute it to a community or a religion and not to the individual. But if the bad act is committed by someone whose profile, interests and agendas are uncomfortably close to your own, detach the malefactor from everything that is going on or is in the air (he came from nowhere) and characterize him as a one-off, non-generalizable, sui generis phenomenon.

The only thing more breathtaking than the effrontery of the move is the ease with which so many fall in with it. I guess it’s because both those who perform it and those who eagerly consume it save themselves the trouble of serious thought.

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