Is Obama’s America Still the Land of the Free?
Ann Coulter, in Treason, asks why so often “are liberals consumed with the assailant’s motive. How about: Until we understand why rapists would rather violently rape a woman than take her to dinner and a movie, we cannot respond to the crime of rape.”
With a liberal president in office, there is no acceptable motive for the Obama administration’s proposal to monitor newsrooms across the country.
Against this backdrop, Federal Communications Commissioner Ajit Pai says this program could be used in “pressuring media organizations into covering certain stories.”
As Pai states in the The Wall Street Journal, “Last May the FCC proposed an initiative to thrust the federal government into newsrooms across the country. With its ‘Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs,’ or CIN, the agency plans to send researchers to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run. A field test in Columbia, S.C., is scheduled to begin this spring. The purpose of the CIN, according to the FCC, is to ferret out information from television and radio broadcasters about ‘the process by which stories are selected’ and how often stations cover ‘critical information needs,’ along with ‘perceived station bias’ and ‘perceived responsiveness to underserved populations.'”
The Obama administration, which is collecting the phone records of millions of Americans, has admitted to spying on reporters at the Associated Press and Fox News, and has published an enemies list—not enemies like foreign combatants or domestic terrorists, but political and ideological thoughts leaders who do not agree with this president’s policies or actions—is now going to try and oversee the media. Can one imagine if the right engaged in these sorts of un-American activities?
Soon enough, Americans can be in legal trouble if they do not have health care. Jail time and fines can be imposed if you do not comply with Obamacare’s requirements. As a resident of the New York, the least-free state in America, according to a study by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, these policies are absurd. America’s media capital, New York, is by far the least-free state in the union, with the highest taxes, poor economic regulation and restrictive personal freedoms.
Those of us who work in public relations and in the communications business must stand up against this move which would purport to send government researchers into newsrooms to determine how news organizations decide which stories to run.
As Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, says, “We have seen a corrupt IRS unleashed on conservatives. We have seen an imperial president bypass Congress and change the law with executive orders. And now we see the heavy hand of the Obama administration poised to interfere with the First Amendment rights of journalists. It’s clear that the Obama administration is only interested in utilizing intimidation tactics—at the expense of Americans and the Constitution. The federal government has no place attempting to control the media, using the unconstitutional actions of repressive regimes to squelch free speech.”
The Obama totalitarian is indeed exposed.
Ronn Torossian is one of America’s most prolific and respected public relations experts. He is the best-selling author of “For Immediate Release: Shape Minds, Build Brands and Deliver Results With Game-Changing Public Relations and a featured op-ed columnist for the Huffington Post, Newsmax, Wired magazine and others.
