OK, everyone defends the 1st amendment. It's made every talker from Sarah Pain to Glenn Beck to Rachel Maddow very rich, and every protester from teabaggers to skinheads to pro-lifers very recognizable. It also permits me to write this. But here's the question -- when does a right come back to bite you...?
One simple test. Google the US Geological Survey about the Bakken oil formations in North Dakota/ Montana. It reports 3 to 4.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Sounds good. But in a currently circulating blog sensation, some someone out there is insisting it's actually worth 2 trillion barrels! "The largest reserve in the world, eight times the size of Saudi Arabia that could service the US for the next 2000 years."
Why isn't more being done with this energy bonanza...? The blogger has the 1st amendment right to stir the oil fields of our mind with the un-edited charge that environmentalists working with unarmed lobbyists are killing it. Sounds like the next Oliver Stone expose movie? Well, it could be, but Stone is working on another epic for cable addressing another conspiracy: Why Stalin & Hitler have been given a bad rap.
See why news editors still count? And so far, they usually work only for newspapers, not basement bloggers.
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Here's one reader who prays responsible journalism (newspapers) survives.
ReplyDeleteI must admit I don't read the paper as much as I used to now that I have a computer, but I still see the need for them, and like the comment above, I hope they survive too!
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