Survey: Support for First Amendment Up
Support for the First Amendment is on the rise and many Americans want more information about how the government is fighting the war on terrorism, a survey released Friday shows.The nationwide telephone poll of 1,000 adults found that 19 percent of respondents strongly agreed that the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees. That number was down sharply from the 41 percent found on last year's survey, conducted nine months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Nearly half of those questioned believed they had too little access to information about the government's war on terrorism, according to the annual survey commissioned by the Nashville-based First Amendment Center and American Journalism Review magazine.
A majority of respondents said the consolidation of media ownership decreases both the range and quality of information they receive. Congress is in the process of repealing a Federal Communications Commission decision that would relax media ownership rules.
"Most journalists I know believe they are doing an objective and autonomous job of reporting, but by overwhelming numbers Americans view that content being tainted by corporate ownership," he said. "That's a real wake-up call for the news business."
The survey also criticized the news media's performance in other areas. Nearly half of respondents said America has too much press freedom and more than a third said the media has been too aggressive in asking questions during the war on terrorism."The public clearly wants more information on the war on terror and yet they don't entirely trust the news media to deliver it to them," Paulson said.
The survey found that 68 percent of people felt the inclusion of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance did not violate the Constitutional principle of separation of church and state.
It explicitly establishes a theocracy and I don't mean that as hyperbole. If the nation is "under God" then the nation, it's laws, and it's citizens are also "under God" as well, meaning we are subservient to It and lesser than It. Arguements that the insertion is a symbolic gesture miss the point entirely. The government has NO RIGHT to establish these things and certainly NO RIGHT to try and force people to follow them and recite them.
Argh.
UPDATE 2/1/2005 8:45am
The nation continues its downward spiral into titanic stupidity: Student Respect for the First Amendment is Dropping?
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You oppose that bit of the pledge. You must a be a TERRORIST!!!
I agree on that. And no, the media thing makes no sense, but since when has the public ever known what the hell they were talking about?
Posted by: APF on August 2, 2003 12:09 AM"The public clearly wants more information on the war on terror and yet they don't entirely trust the news media to deliver it to them"
I dunno Drizz, seems pretty clear to me. People want unbiased facts, _actual_ reporting, not journalisim.
Many Americans are tired of tuning into the evening news to discover that the "networks" think that we, as a nation _asked_ for 9/11 to happen.
Hell, the majority of the network news stations, and major newspapers have practically been run by liberals for the last thirty years. So, yeah, I agree with the statement. People don't trust the news media to deliver accurate, un-biased, factual reporting.
Most news venues are more of an op-ed than a report of the facts.
Posted by: Grim on August 2, 2003 12:42 AMOh god, not the Liberal Media Conspiracy thing again...
Posted by: APF on August 2, 2003 03:37 PMGrim, perhaps it makes some sense, but my angle was that how could the public first say they want more new information and then say the press has too much freedom and ask questions too aggressively? That's what blew my top.
APF, my mini-take on the political/philosophical bias in the media (and all human institutions have it) is that it leans towards the left. It isn't a deliberate conspiracy by any honest appraisal. But examine the way things are reported using a standard of individual rights (roughly speaking, "the right") vs. collective rights (roughly speaking, "the left") and the result is overwhelmingly towards the left side of the spectrum.
I do wish the there was a news outlet whose sole defining purpose is complete factual objectivity. The wire services (AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, UPI, etc.) try to do this but fail regularly. I want to know what happened, who was involved, when and where the event occured, and a historical context. The last part is the one the media fails the most often on, in my opinion.
Posted by: Drizz on August 2, 2003 08:55 PMDoes every pledge of allegiance establish a religion -- the worship of government? As a Libertarian, and an attorney too, I am fascinated by the Pledge of Allegiance case before the U.S. Supreme Court. As a pro bono service, I help educate the public about the litigation.
Few people know that if they pledge allegiance to the flag, then they recite a pledge written by a self-proclaimed socialist in the U.S. nationalism movement, to promote socialism in the most socialistic institution -government schools.
Few people know that the original salute to the flag was like the horrid National Socialist German Workers' Party salute and predated it. (photos at http://members.ij.net/rex/pledge2.html).
The pledge was authored in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, first cousin and follower of the socialist author Edward Bellamy. Edward Bellamy's futuristic novel, "Looking Backward," (1888) described life in the year 2000. It described a totalitarian society where private trade is outlawed, where all men are in an "industrial army," and where the monolithic government school is part of the "industrial army" system. It was portrayed as utopia.
As strange as it may seem, the totalitarian ideas that inspired the pledge's author resulted in mass atrocities worldwide.