By Derek Hunter
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Was there anything about the Sandy Hook massacre the
media got right on the day it happened? In their rush to be first, they ignored
their obligation to be right. Nearly every detail they disseminated Friday was
wrong, even down to the name of the killer. Their desire to sensationalize had
them shoving microphones in the faces of children who couldn’t possibly
comprehend the events of the day. This was just the latest example of how out
of control and dangerous the media has become, and it’s time government did
something to protect us.
You’re probably asking yourself, “What about the First
Amendment? Freedom of the press means we can’t regulate them, right?”
Technically, yes. But since they, en masse, want to ignore the Second
Amendment, to claim since it was written in a time of muskets, it is outdated
and doesn’t apply to new guns, let’s apply the same to the First.
The First Amendment was written in a time of movable type
printing presses and quills, not 24-hour cable news channels and the Internet.
Using the media’s logic, the First Amendment doesn’t apply.
I’m not suggesting we should simply outlaw any media
outside of print, but if we can limit the Second Amendment however we like, we
can do the same to the First.
Congress should impose massive fines on those who get
facts wrong. Not newspaper reporters – that’s dealt with a different way. But
TV. As liberals love to remind us, broadcasters make their living over “public
airwaves.” Conveying false information over them is a violation of the trust placed
in those institutions by the public and should be punished.
The media would like to punish innocent gun owners for
the actions of a tiny amount of guilty ones, so all media should be regulated
because of the actions of a few bad ones.
NBC News, which I’m told was once a respected news
organization, deliberately edited the 911 call in the Trayvon Martin case to
make George Zimmerman sound racist when he was simply answering the
dispatcher’s question. In the same case, the New York Times created a new race
of humans – the “white Hispanic” – specifically to sensationalize that case
into a racial issue. Although The Times is in print and thus protected, it also
published that story on the Internet, which is not. Let’s punish The Times.
Zimmerman is suing NBC News and should win easily. But
government could impose a minimum fine of, say, $1 billion for each offense.
Doing so would bring about the end of the race to be first and restore the
drive to be right. It also would ruin NBC News.
Media regulation could also be used to stop networks from
conferring the fame on these the monsters they so desperately seek. They’re
dead, but their name lives on in infamy, which is exactly what they want.
Mentioning their name could be outlawed too.
All of this, of course, is absurd. The American people
never would stand for it. We all exercise our free speech rights on a daily
basis, and we’d never sit by and watch government outlaw speech. But many do
exactly that with other parts of the First Amendment, particularly the
religious freedom clause, and the Second.
No one would tolerate the creation of some sort of
“special circumstances” where the Fifth Amendment wouldn’t apply and someone
could be forced to testify in a criminal case against themselves – but somehow
the Second is fair game.
How many laws did the Sandy Hook monster break in
committing these murders? Why did he not respect the gun ban in the school?
Because he was crazy. (That’s not to say he was stupid. Stupid and crazy, often
used interchangeably, are two entirely different things.) Why aren’t we looking
to see what warning signs were ignored by those around him and alert people to
be on the lookout for those in others rather than the knee-jerk response of
infringing on the rights of innocent Americans?
Liberals have a tradition of vilifying innocent people
with the guilt of others. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Democrat FDR had
Japanese Americans rounded up and essentially imprisoned for the sin of being
Japanese. At its core, that’s what’s happening here.
Rather than focus on why this madman committed this
heinous crime so we can prevent similar acts by equally ill people in the
future, elected Democrats are ready yet again to impose government into areas
the document they swore an oath to preserve, protect and defend expressly
forbids. And the media, draped in the protections of that document, stands
ready to be their willing accomplice in infringing upon others.
The American people cannot allow any of their rights –
even if they choose not to exercise some of them – to be stripped away to
appease an emotional mob being manipulated by politicians and fellow travelers
in the media simply because unbalanced people abuse theirs. If we do, we might
as well just surrender all of them now.
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