The United States generally does not punish "hate speech"—the First Amendment typically protects even vile speech that disparages racial and religious groups. This notion may be uncomfortable for many Americans today, but 100 years of history show how tricky it is to define hate speech, how bans on speech open the door to abuse, and how such bans can harm the very groups they aim to protect. For these reasons, civil liberties groups in the 1930s and 1940s insisted that the pursuit of equality depended on freedom, even for unpopular speech. In the 1960s, the Supreme Court bolstered speech protections in ways that allowed hateful speech to be protected. These protections also extended to civil rights activists, whose ideas were sometimes deemed controversial. Today, we should remember why the United States protects hate speech. The alternative would give leaders too much power to silence anyone who disagrees with them.
"Murrow concedes that, for all the lip service paid to it, there is no such thing as true objectivity in handling the news. The job, as he sees it, is 'to know one's own prejudices and try to do the best you can to be fair.'...Murrow thinks that TV at large threatens to become an 'opiate' and that the network managements lack 'guts.' His son Casey is permitted to watch TV only half an hour a day…TV men are exhilarated by their technological power to reach at one instant into almost every living room in the U.S., yet timid about using it to edify. So far, for all the earnest thought and energy that is devoted to it, electronic journalism has illuminated with bright flashes but few steady beams of light."
"No one has a better feeling for this mood, and no one exploits it as well, as Beck. He is the hottest thing in the political-rant racket, left or right. A gifted entrepreneur of angst in a white-hot market. A man with his ear uniquely tuned to the precise frequency at which anger, suspicion and the fear that no one's listening all converge…He is a gifted storyteller with a knack for stitching seemingly unrelated data points into possible conspiracies–if he believed in conspiracies, which he doesn't, necessarily; he's just asking questions. He's just sayin'. In cheerful days of yore, he was a terrific host of a morning-zoo show on an FM Top 40 station. But these aren't cheerful times. For conservatives, these are times of economic uncertainty and political weakness, and Beck has emerged as a virtuoso on the strings of their discontent."
"If that strikes you as insufficiently calculating, you are starting to understand Bernie's momentum. And to understand the Sanders surge is to understand the spirit of 2016. Look around at the candidates who are stumbling and fumbling toward the first balloting less than five months away. Republican Jeb Bush of the White House Bushes learned to count delegates when most kids were still counting fireflies. Democrat Hillary Clinton is part of a family that once commissioned a poll to choose a family vacation that would endear them to voters. So far, calculation is getting them nowhere. The surging candidates–rampant Donald Trump, novice Ben Carson and retro Bernie Sanders–represent the opposite. Slickness is out, conviction is in."
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