Seriously, I'm just amazed, and I thought I couldn't be amazed any more at this stage of the election cycle.
Political Radar: Palin Fears Media Threaten Her First Amendment Rights
ABC News' Steven Portnoy reports: In a conservative radio interview that aired in Washington, D.C. Friday morning, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin said she fears her First Amendment rights may be threatened by "attacks" from reporters who suggest she is engaging in a negative campaign against Barack Obama.
Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama's associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks. Rather, for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate's free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.
"If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations," Palin told host Chris Plante, "then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media." [...]
I'm sorry; did I miss a memo? Is there a rider to the First Amendment somewhere that I haven't heard anything about? Because the last I heard, attacks by the press had diddly/squat to do with a person's First Amendment rights. And the notion that a public figure, especially a politician, has a right to have their words go out into the ether and remain unexamined and unchallenged is positively Soviet.
In all seriousness, don't you get the feeling that the far-right chunk of the Republicans look wistfully on what was politically possible in the good ol' Evil Empire, and wish that they had that power Right Now? Mind, the state would be a great deal more corporatist, and intensely theocratic -- as opposed to officially athiest -- but the idea of both repressing and punishing any type of dissent from anyone, any where, any time, the idea that anything said by a person in power (or seeking power) could be allowed to remain unchallenged on penalty of disappearance or death ... really, that looks like the kind of state they'd really love to have. And thanks to Our Glorious Shrub, parts of it are in place even today.
Thing is, to a certain extent, I can at least understand Palin being somewhat unclear on what it is that a vice president does. After all, the only formal definition is that the person is the heir apparent to the president, as well as casting the tie-breaking vote in the senate. What the past few vice presidents have actually done has varied widely. As far as I can tell, Dan Quayle doesn't seem to have done anything at all besides sitting around looking pretty(ish). Al Gore was involved in a lot of policy issues, and given that the Senate was fairly closely divided during Clinton's day, wound up casting a few votes as president pro tempore. Cheney, of course, has been president de facto, if not de jure, quite a lot of the time. And I get that Palin's not a lawyer. But still ... to have such a profound and basic misunderstanding of the First Amendment, in this day and age, is just baffling.
Frankly, the below comes much closer to interfering with the proper exercise of First Amendment rights, and even it doesn't quite pass the smell test.
Obama Boots Reporters From Conservative Papers (abcnews.com)
By RUSSELL GOLDMAN
Oct. 31, 2008 —
Barack Obama's campaign has booted from its airplane three reporters who work for newspapers that have endorsed John McCain. The campaign says that a limited number of seats forced it to make the tough decision of which journalists would be permitted to follow the Democratic presidential candidate in the last four days of the campaign, but the papers are calling foul, claiming they were targeted for their editorial-page positions and kicked off while nonpolitical publications like Glamour and Jet magazines remained on board. Eliminated from the plane's traveling press were the Washington Times, the New York Post and the Dallas Morning News.
"It feels like the journalistic equivalent of redistributing the wealth," said John Solomon, executive editor of the Washington Times. "We paid all along to travel and cover Obama. This is a matter of basic fairness. We've committed a lot of resources and have been covering Obama since the beginning. By the campaign's own admission our reporter has done a fair job," he said. "We've covered him since 2007 and paid our dues. By the numbers we've covered Obama longer and given more coverage to him than many of the other people who were given seats. Our readers are mostly from Virginia, an important battleground state. He's not punishing us, he is punishing them," Solomon said. The Times is one of the most-read news Web sites in the country and has one of the highest circulations in Virginia, Solomon said. He said the paper would fly its reporters on its own to continue coverage.
In the final days of a campaign, it is not uncommon for journalists to be shuffled as multiple news agencies rush to get a coveted seat close to the candidate. "Unfortunately, demand for seats on the plane during this final weekend has far exceeded supply, and because of logistical issues we made the decision not to add a second plane," said Obama campaign senior adviser Anita Dunn. "This means we've had to make hard and unpleasant for all concerned decisions about limiting some news organizations and in some cases not being in a position to offer space to news organizations altogether," she said.
The Dallas Morning News, which has a daily circulation of about 300,000, acknowledged that it had not been covering the campaign as long as some other papers, but that it was discouraged to learn that magazines like Glamour had retained their seats. "We're protesting it and we're not happy about it," said editor Bob Mong of the Dallas Morning News. "We're not in a swing state, but given our history of outstanding political reporting, we're upset, particularly when you see guys like Glamour on board."
Mong said he had no evidence that his reporter had been ejected given the paper's editorial decision. A Morning News reporter, he said, was ejected from the campaign plane of John McCain, Obama's Republican rival, earlier in the week, but had recently gotten it back.
The Obama campaign said the decision was not based on the way Obama had been covered and pointed out that both the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, which have been critical of Obama, had retained their seats. The campaign said it needed to make room for the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, but reportedly Jet and Ebony magazines have seats as well.
Col Allan, the New York Post's editor in chief, said, "We are happy to be on the outside looking in. It's what makes The New York Post special. We are not in the news business to be liked."
Journalists have complained in the past that campaigns kicked them off the planes as retribution for their coverage. In 2004, The New York Times said it was not given a seat on Air Force 2 when Vice President Dick Cheney was stumping with President Bush, because the vice president was displeased with the paper's coverage of him.
To be quite honest, I have not the slightest doubt that those publications' editorial position and/or coverage played a large role in their getting kicked off. Jet and Ebony are more or less the magazines of record for the African American community in this country, and he offends them only at a certain amount of peril. The campaign couldn't kick off the Wall Street Journal or Fox News without making its "unseating" guidelines painfully obvious. Even so, I must confess, I don't know why you'd keep Glamour on for something like this. (I will also admit to being intensely curious as to whether or not one of the reporters allowed on was from the Chicago Defender, just because.)
Does jettisoning those publication from the campaign plane interfere with their ability to exercise their First Amendment rights? Well ... not really, no. They can still get to the events, given that a candidate's schedule is published in advance. Of course, they probably need to start prepositioning reporters in various places, since they no longer get the easy travel, and that alone will cost them more money. That said, nobody ever said that exercising your First Amendment rights was free. And note that those papers aren't raising a First Amendment issue where they more logically could; presumably, they actually know what those rights are and when they're being substantively interfered with.
I will be so very glad when E-Day is finally here and done and we can stop hearing quite so much claptrap like that.